"To me, that's just a continuation of a trend we were already seeing with zero click. Platforms were already making this a pattern in our content consumption habits." In this episode, Kate Pluth shares how AI is reshaping content marketing. LLMs are now "just another zero-click platform," where people expect instant answers instead of clicking through pages. Discover what this shift means for the future of content teams and strategy.
Kate Pluth led Dropbox's lean Content Strategy team before recently joining Qualtrics. She believes enterprise content scales when structure, data, and taste work together. She put this belief into practice by running four agile pods at Dropbox, each using real-time insights to "absorb changes and learnings without breaking stride." This approach turns go-to-market plans into repeatable systems and delivers "one Dropbox, not multiple personalities."
Kate's playbook centers on a database-driven content calendar that tripled output for Dropbox Sign without increasing budget. She brought in data science to guide every deliverable and used AI to eliminate "all the little paper cuts." This approach lets teams focus on creative decisions. As Kate says, "If you really want a humming content engine, you've got to automate as much of that as you possibly can."
Kate Pluth is Director of Content Strategy at Qualtrics and previously led Dropbox’s content strategy team. She builds systems, processes, and cross‑team connections that preserve quality at scale, blending structure, data, and editorial taste so content ships and delivers business value.
Her results prove the approach works. She tripled production for Dropbox Sign without increasing budget by automating operations. She rolled out Writer at Dropbox after using it as a power user at previous companies. Her agency background and early work editing hotel pages at Expedia shaped her eye for scale and detail. She's also a New York Times Cooking enthusiast who studies recipe content systems. If you need to do more with less, her methods deserve your attention.
This episode reveals the inner workings of Dropbox's content engine. Here are the most actionable takeaways and memorable quotes:
Kate challenges the classic enterprise content playbook, which relies on big, sequential campaigns (the "Waterfall" method). She pushes for Agile: smaller, repeatable cycles that enable faster feedback and changes. This matters because the old approach often leads to slow pivots and missed opportunities. An Agile mindset helps teams respond quickly to changing business needs and audience signals. Flexibility and speed often beat rigid, months-long processes.
Kate reveals the backbone of Dropbox's content operation: small, cross-functional pods powered by continuous insights and reporting. This setup helps the team stay nimble. They can shift priorities and tactics as new data comes in while maintaining alignment across the company. For large enterprises, this model breaks down silos. Every piece of content is shaped by the latest audience and performance signals instead of gut instinct or outdated plans.
Kate identifies a common challenge: core writers and strategists are always in demand, which leads to burnout and quality drops. Her solution is a tiered resourcing model. Agencies and AI tools act as a "release valve" to handle overflow work. This protects the time and energy of in-house experts for the most critical projects. It's a practical way to scale output without sacrificing quality or burning out your best people.
Kate's central operational principle: an automated, database-driven content calendar is the single source of truth for the entire content engine. By linking the calendar to workflows, SOPs, and campaign data, her team eliminates manual tracking and miscommunication. The payoff is clear: less time on admin, more time on strategy and execution, plus a real-time view of what's happening across the content ecosystem.
Kate highlights the power of "digital listening" tools like BrandWatch, Sprinklr, and SparkToro. By monitoring real user conversations at scale, her team discovers new questions, pain points, and white-space opportunities. They then determine where Dropbox can add genuine value. This approach leads to more relevant, differentiated content and helps avoid the echo chamber of internal brainstorming.
This quote captures AI's practical benefits. By automating meeting notes and summaries, Kate's team frees up mental space for higher-level work: strategy, analysis, and creative problem-solving. It's a reminder to look for small, everyday wins with AI. These compound over time, making teams more productive and focused.
Kate sees SEO and content distribution evolving as LLMs reshape how people find and consume information. Instead of focusing solely on click-throughs, content teams should aim to deliver value directly within the platform — whether that's Google, ChatGPT, or another tool. The future of content is about utility and instant answers, with traffic as a secondary goal.
This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.
Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they've learned along the way.
Check out other episodes in the season here
New York Times Cooking (02:22): Consumer content experience Kate admires for its scalable content model and strong community elements.
Expedia (02:56): Early career example Kate cites as inspiration for building scalable, high-volume content models.
Writer (formerly Qordoba) (18:01): AI writing platform powering Dropbox's style enforcement, release-valve tier, and featured as a public case study in the episode.
HelloSign / Dropbox Sign (22:37): E-signature product where Kate piloted her content operations model before rolling it out company-wide.
Airtable (22:52): The platform Dropbox originally used for its automated content calendar. It helped triple output before the team migrated to another project management tool.
SparkToro (28:12): Audience research tool referenced as an example of listening to customer conversations (noted for its SMB focus).
BrandWatch and Sprinklr (28:44): Digital-listening tools Kate has used to mine audience conversations for content ideas and trends.
Dropbox Dash (30:41): Universal search and AI agent used at Dropbox to surface company knowledge and reduce tab overload.
Knotch (33:16): Content performance framework/tool referenced during the discussion on KPIs and measurement.
Forget the Funnel (35:24): Consultancy referenced for its user-journey-mapping approach during the KPI conversation.
Digital Relevance by Ardath Albee (35:29): Book cited by Kate as the source for the "screw the funnel, it's an experience" mindset.
Follow Kate Pluth on LinkedIn.
[00:00:00] Kate Pluth: A lot of that traditional integrated campaign motion is inherently waterfall. And even in content production you do have to like create a brief and then make a draft and then review that brief. Like that is just inherently waterfall. So I actually recently have been planning with my team a more agile approach where we have basically content pods with rolling insight and reporting at the top. Feeding everything.
[00:00:23] Ty Magnin: Welcome to The Animalz podcast. I'm Ty Magnan. And I'm Tim Metz. This season on The Animalz Podcast. We're pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Hear from content leaders from some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they learned along the way.
[00:00:45] Ty Magnin: Today we're chatting with Kate Pluth. She's the head of content strategy at Dropbox. Kate's been the powerhouse behind Dropbox's content for the last four years. She currently manages a pretty large team that sits under integrated marketing. Before this, she helped on the transition from HelloSign to Dropbox, sign that rebrand on that specific product.
[00:01:06] Ty Magnin: And before that, she was leading content at a global network called Metia. Today's conversation covered how Kate is using different systems and tools to build a content engine, how the team is using AI to get more content out the door or more effective content out the door. And also how she's structured her team into pods and even how content works with other teams beyond marketing to make sure that they have.
[00:01:31] Ty Magnin: One brand voice for Dropbox. Hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Kate Pluth. Kate, thanks so much for joining us on The Animalz Podcast. Uh, would love if you give a short intro for our audience that doesn't know you yet, and then of course you gotta answer our favorite question. What content are you consuming lately?
[00:01:48] Kate Pluth: Uh, my name is Kate Pluth. I head up the content strategy team at Dropbox. Uh, prior to that, I came up with the ranks through agency and have had a whole track record in B2B Tech marketing. I love. The humble utility, whether that's e-signature or cloud storage, uh, you name it. I just like people to help people make informed decisions about how to do their best work and content I'm consuming.
[00:02:16] Kate Pluth: This is not very nerdy, but the, or it's not very business oriented, but the first thing that comes to mind is that I am a New York Times cooking nerd. And actually I just, I as a content experience, I feel like New York Times cooking has so well dialed in that whole website and app.
[00:02:32] Ty Magnin: Yeah.
[00:02:33] Kate Pluth: In terms of content systems where it, you know, can move from different devices and.
[00:02:38] Kate Pluth: They've really thought it through, and the, the notes and the comments, it's really creates a community around it. And everything they're doing now with video is so interesting. I just love it.
[00:02:45] Ty Magnin: Yeah. You know, I think I've underappreciated that, uh, up until now. So thanks for shining a light on. You think it's good.
[00:02:52] Kate Pluth: My, my first job was editing hotel exp, uh, hotel descriptions for Expedia and. It was the day-to-day was very rote and boring, but the content system and the content models that they have created is so incredible just to be able to, they basically have a whole content ecosystem that is like a check boxes of amenities, and they've created a proprietary Madlib system to generate all of their hotel descriptions across seven points of sale, across a bajillion languages all over the world.
[00:03:25] Kate Pluth: And then they realize what the content. They're on a landmine of content and so now they license it to other people as well. It's incredible. And so that to me is like, oh, New York Times, like they've figured that out with the recipes and the cooking as well. It's just like incredible, valuable repository of like all the content models and how it's all dynamically fed.
[00:03:46] Kate Pluth: Yeah. How we nerd for this stuff.
[00:03:47] Ty Magnin: Yeah. And that was like before the age of Gen AI too?
[00:03:51] Kate Pluth: Yes, yes. They've been doing this forever. Yeah.
[00:03:54] Ty Magnin: Interesting. Got my wheels turning already. Uh, I was originally gonna ask like, oh, what's the last thing you cooked for the New York Times? Cooking, suite.
[00:04:04] Kate Pluth: Oh, I did a riff on their tamale pie.
[00:04:07] Kate Pluth: CSA box had this beautiful blue corn meal in it the other week. And I'm like, okay, we gotta, and we gotta make some tamal pie.
[00:04:14] Ty Magnin: Nice. Came out good.
[00:04:16] Kate Pluth: Yeah, it was, I'm
[00:04:17] Ty Magnin: hungry. Tamal Pie. Um, we'll put a around in the notes. Okay. Let's talk about Dropbox in, in content. I think one thing, you know, this whole season's about enterprise content and one thing that kind of helps.
[00:04:33] Ty Magnin: Grounded is, uh, if you can help us understand the sense of scale of like what the content operations looks like at Dropbox. So maybe it's just like total employees at Dropbox, maybe total people in marketing. That'd be helpful. Just like anchoring, uh, data point.
[00:04:48] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Well, Dropbox is, a company sits at about 2000 people, which actually is, I think is a helpful reminder that.
[00:04:55] Kate Pluth: For the incredible, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions in our customer base. Um, we're able to serve them with a relatively lean company size. And within marketing, um, we sit across, you know, there's product marketing, integrated marketing, brand marketing. Those teams work in lockstep and, uh, the. My content strategy team sits horizontally in integrated marketing, kind of connecting the dots from the go to market strategy, from PMM, helping inject content across all of our paid and owned channels.
[00:05:28] Kate Pluth: Um, and then, um, working with our brand marketing team to think about how we connect that really top of funnel brand story into something that is relevant to somebody on a buyer journey.
[00:05:40] Ty Magnin: Interesting. So you're sitting in integrated marketing.
[00:05:44] Kate Pluth: Yep.
[00:05:44] Ty Magnin: And therefore like serving the organization through the creation of content that needs to go within an integrated campaign.
[00:05:53] Ty Magnin: Is that about right?
[00:05:54] Kate Pluth: Yes, and the integrated campaign model is one that we have really been working to uplevel over the last year. Um, and to, to truly not just be, you know, each channel in their own silo, but really thinking about how do we, how do we go to market against our ICPs in a truly integrated way, and what's the best way to do that?
[00:06:13] Kate Pluth: Um, especially when we want to have a really fast pace of learning and not have like a, a big clunky quarterly plan that. Makes it really hard to update if we're learning something new halfway through that.
[00:06:25] Tim Metz: So what kind of changes have you been making there? I'm curious. Curious what you've, what you've implemented.
[00:06:30] Kate Pluth: Yes, yes. Um, so the crux of this, I've been thinking a lot about agile versus waterfall in our content operations lately because a lot of that traditional integrated campaign motion is. Is inherently waterfall and even in content production you have to like create a brief and then make a draft and then review that brief.
[00:06:47] Kate Pluth: Like that is just inherently waterfall. The playbook that, you know, even analysts purport is sort of, you treat this cornerstone asset and then you derive and distribute that you know, for a long time. And that is a really efficient way to work. It's a great way to work. But again, if you are learning new things along the way, you it has, there takes a lot of confidence in an idea and in a target audience.
[00:07:11] Kate Pluth: To be able to create that cornerstone asset and make it really good today, and to have enough of a shelf life that you can continue to distribute that same idea in other ways over time. Yeah. If we were gonna do something that was more agile, like what was that gonna look like? So I actually recently have been planning with my team a more agile approach where we have basically content pods with rolling insight and reporting at the top, feeding everything, and then it's all based on.
[00:07:41] Kate Pluth: What is the nature of what it takes to get that content done? So from performance standpoint, you've got really quick turn, like ad copy, experiment, variants, landing pages, emails, like those things like you should be able to just like turn around really quickly. So that's
[00:07:57] Ty Magnin: a pod, like that's
[00:07:58] Kate Pluth: a pod content.
[00:08:00] Kate Pluth: And then we've got, uh, an explanatory content pod is kind of what I'm calling it. I don't know if it's the best name, but it's that core content that's like medium form or long form. Yeah. Your guides, your articles, your explainer videos, um, use cases, those kinds of things that, you know, there are ways, yes, you can use AI to support that.
[00:08:20] Kate Pluth: There are ways you're probably gonna use agencies or things. Yeah. It's just like a different motion. But can you get it to be like. Just let them focus on having a really predictable monthly drumbeat where something is going live every week. We know what's gonna be happening each month. If you've got a new ICP, you wanna be testing, okay?
[00:08:39] Kate Pluth: We'll slot you in if you have, you know, a new something that you wanna try, it's like, okay, we've got a way to like absorb changes and absorb learnings without breaking stride. And then I've got two, two additional pods that are just kind of unique ways that we, that we have to treat content. One is for our customer content, customer stories, and customer testimonials is if you can't just kick one of those off whenever you want, because you need to have a customer who's like game and ready to tell their story.
[00:09:05] Kate Pluth: So, and the way you handle and make the most of that customer engagement, uh, really takes some certain ways that you need to. It in order to, to get that done effectively. So that's in its own pod. And then, um, we have a, like a thought leadership kind of experiential pod is, again, I don't know if the name's right, but we have a liaison with our virtual events and webinars.
[00:09:28] Kate Pluth: Um, thinking about, okay, can do we have a thought leadership, uh, storytelling framework? We really have somebody sinking their teeth in talking to executives across the business, talking to different customers, getting the right folks to have a draw, to be a feature on those events, and using that as a way to kind of create a wiki for what are the hot takes that we wanna be having across all of our content.
[00:09:51] Ty Magnin: Really interesting. So again, the thesis is like the operations of each of those pods is significantly different enough so that it's like it makes sense to group them accordingly.
[00:10:07] Ty Magnin: You have, I know there are writers, but like who else would be in a pod?
[00:10:12] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Strategist, producer. It's honestly, we've got some kind of strategist or program manager and then some kind of producer really at, at the heart of it, coming up with the ideas, seeing the ideas, um, especially, and then we've got, you know, writing design video, um, videography is, is a big one too,
[00:10:31] Ty Magnin: within each pop videography,
[00:10:33] Kate Pluth: uh, within two of them.
[00:10:34] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because that, I mean, that's, that's how people wanna consume content now increasingly is, you know, you know, this is a podcast and we're on video.
[00:10:46] Ty Magnin: Um, how many people are on this content team?
[00:10:49] Kate Pluth: Uh, our team is eight right now.
[00:10:51] Ty Magnin: Okay. And then what about that top layer of like, uh, data, uh, analytics?
[00:10:55] Ty Magnin: I know you didn't call it that, but uh, maybe reframe it as what you
[00:10:59] Kate Pluth: do. We, we work really closely with our data science team and our performance media teams and like all the other teams that are directly have their hands on the data to get that feedback loop in place. Yeah.
[00:11:09] Tim Metz: And it feeds into all the, all the polls.
[00:11:11] Tim Metz: Right. So they all, they all get data back on everything that they're doing. Yeah. Okay. That's great.
[00:11:17] Kate Pluth: Yes.
[00:11:17] Ty Magnin: They used have somewhat unique APIs then too.
[00:11:20] Kate Pluth: Yes, yes. With all of that I've got, um, KPIs for volume and velocity of delivery. KPIs for engagement is the other piece that I think is the thing that we really.
[00:11:32] Kate Pluth: Our owning in our integrated campaigns is we've got other teams who are doing all these activations, but really is the content working?
[00:11:40] Ty Magnin: Yeah.
[00:11:41] Kate Pluth: Uh, that's the end engagement. So that's what, that's what we're looking at. Yeah.
[00:11:45] Ty Magnin: Nice. Really interesting. And so I imagine that there's content being produced outside of your team at Dropbox, such as product marketing, maybe brand.
[00:11:53] Ty Magnin: Can you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:11:55] Kate Pluth: Yeah, I mean that, that's exactly, honestly, this is why I love being a content person, because there are, of course, in any enterprise, any organization, you can't, there's no way for one team to actually be doing all of the content, but it means you get to engage and work with all sorts of people across the business to at least connect the dots of like, okay, this is the part of the conversation I'm responsible for.
[00:12:18] Kate Pluth: What are you guys doing? And can we make sure that as we're going to market, we still come across as one Dropbox and we're not multiple personalities. Um, and so that is something that we work, really, we've been working really closely with our brand marketing team to think about how does that brand campaign follow into.
[00:12:35] Kate Pluth: The rest of the funnel. Um, I also keep really good, uh, close tabs with our folks in cx like our learn and our help center, our content designers folks who, once they're a customer, they're creating a bunch of really great content too, and they've got some really inspirational scaled successes and like things that they're doing with AI for updating their video libraries that we should all be learning about.
[00:12:57] Kate Pluth: Not just the tactics, but also what's being made and making sure that we're not completely duplicating any
[00:13:02] Ty Magnin: efforts. What is the relationship like between you and these other teams? Like, um, is it formal, is it informal? Uh, and I know you have this kind of like, uh, governance council. Maybe you can start, tell us a little bit about that too.
[00:13:16] Kate Pluth: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the, the, it's, it's mostly informal. The, the editorial council at Dropbox, um, was a way to somewhat formally bring. Everybody who writes on behalf of the company together, frankly, it was, it's been, it was mostly volunteer run for a while, but connected folks across, uh, content design and CX and marketing and, uh, product marketing and even legal and, you know, localization and, and folks who are looking across all of like the mechanics of words and, and all of those things at Dropbox.
[00:13:48] Kate Pluth: Yeah. And that was where we had, we had different folks who were in kind of like leadership. And we had programming in a monthly meeting, and it was the group that was looking after the, uh, Dropbox writing guidelines. Um, although I'm using past tense.
[00:14:03] Ty Magnin: Yeah.
[00:14:04] Kate Pluth: We collectively sort of realized over time too that to really be able to enforce some of this quality bar and some of these guidelines and, and raise the visibility of them across the company to folks who, you know, needed to know.
[00:14:18] Kate Pluth: But didn't always know that it existed, that we needed some kind of like better endorsement. We were already feeling that. And at the same time, it was really becoming apparent. Our CEO really cares about quality writing and really wants that to be an important element of our craft at the company. And so, uh, last fall the writing studio was formed, and that is a real, it is a much more like kind of formal.
[00:14:43] Kate Pluth: Like that team now does have, is accountable for writing quality at the company. And, uh, now we all kind of centrally liaise with them on, okay, what is the training? What are, what are the guidelines? How do we implement AI in the right way on behalf of those guidelines? Uh, and then what is the kind of tiered resourcing framework that they have of like, what do, what do their writers work on personally?
[00:15:10] Kate Pluth: And then what is. Outsource to other teams and then, and uh, or what is just below the line.
[00:15:16] Ty Magnin: So it's sort of like the higher level operating model around content production.
[00:15:20] Kate Pluth: Yes. And they actually sit, so we've got our writing studio and we've got our brand studio. And so they kind of, they sit together to kind of think about words and.
[00:15:30] Kate Pluth: Pictures.
[00:15:31] Ty Magnin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And making sure, again, this idea of one
[00:15:34] Kate Pluth: visual brand and the, the written, the written, the brand volume writing,
[00:15:38] Tim Metz: do you kind of meet formally or like, how, how, how, how does that work? Like when, when do you get together? Or, or who, yeah. How does it. Work in terms of the actual syncing on things as the writing studio?
[00:15:50] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Well, frankly, at this point, I'm just talking to the writing studio all the time. Our, our goals are so aligned. They too have their own pods to think about different aspects of writing across the company, whether that's content design or copywriting or much higher level thought leadership, uh, on, in being, being in the AI conversation.
[00:16:10] Kate Pluth: Uh, from a communication standpoint of just working with them all the time.
[00:16:13] Ty Magnin: You mentioned this sort of like framework of what gets done in-house by team or like outsourced to another team. I'm curious to learn more about that, and I also imagine that there's a few more levels to it, like such as outsourcing to an agency.
[00:16:27] Kate Pluth: Yeah.
[00:16:27] Ty Magnin: AI comes in at a layer. Yeah.
[00:16:29] Kate Pluth: Um, yeah. Do you
[00:16:30] Ty Magnin: have any framework like that?
[00:16:31] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Just as a philosophy I've been thinking about with, with teams when you're, when you're managing a team who looks after content. Is that your, your in-house folks, you want them to be prioritized on the most highly visible things.
[00:16:46] Kate Pluth: Totally. Um, uh, whether that's a product launch or your homepage, like those types of surfaces and places that are just incredibly visible, um, and the most impactful, but. As we were just talking about a bit ago, like there's always going to be more content that needs to be created than a single content team can handle.
[00:17:07] Kate Pluth: And those in-house folks are the ones who are always shoulder tapped first because they're the face.
[00:17:13] Ty Magnin: Sure.
[00:17:14] Kate Pluth: So they need a really, they need a release valve. Ev Every team that I've managed has needs some kind of release valve like that. And that's where, that's where the tiered resourcing can kind of come in, whether you expose that tiering.
[00:17:28] Kate Pluth: Logic to your stakeholders or not? I think you can decide. Uh, but it's been something that was really helpful for our writers before to be felt able to feel like they had a way, even if they were gonna say no, that they had still a weight of. Have, make sure that people had some support and have some oversight, some kind of guardrail on the quality of what was getting produced, even if they weren't on it, in it with their own hands.
[00:17:52] Kate Pluth: And that's where agency can come in, agency relationships for like a certain tier. And then increasingly, we actually ended up using, um, we, we have writer at Dropbox, the, the ai, uh, platforms
[00:18:06] Ty Magnin: writer com. Um, and
[00:18:06] Kate Pluth: that became a way that like, hey, like, you know. This investment, you, you know, you're on your own, but, but we have this tool like you can have suggestions and like get some proofreading to make sure it's brand aligned.
[00:18:18] Kate Pluth: Um, if this is a repeatable use case, like we can build an app around this and bring in like our best examples of good and really fine tune what it is. Um, so that effectively, you know, becomes one of the resourcing layers at your disposal.
[00:18:33] Ty Magnin: And so then folks are allowed to go. Work with whatever agency they want?
[00:18:37] Ty Magnin: Or is there a short list of like approved agencies plus their,
[00:18:41] Kate Pluth: we have a, we have a certain set of agencies that are onboarded to our brand. Um, and in certain seasons here, been kind of centralizing that management with me or with writing studio so that. We, we onboard them. They have the full understanding of what the quality bar is, but then other folks can request their services and know that it's gonna have some of that helpful onboarding and oversight.
[00:19:09] Ty Magnin: Nice. It's funny, there's, there's so many similarities to the program. It sounds you built the Dropbox to what we had going at UiPath when I was leading con, like the government's council for sure. You know, the problem we had to solve there was. We had just hundreds of people contributing content across the organization with who knows what agency, who knows what writers and, and all kinds of different quality, right.
[00:19:31] Ty Magnin: All kinds of different terminology. Yeah. I mean, you know, the kind of stuff that you see with that setup. So we had the council and then we also, we used writer.com as well. One thing we did was create these driver's license quizzes, which basically said, Hey, listen, if you wanna write content for UiPath, you have to like.
[00:19:50] Ty Magnin: Pass this really simple like 20 question test around our voice and our tone or technology. And if you pass that, then you get a license to writer. My team funded it and that then is like your permission and also you get access to the cms like at least like C Uhhuh,
[00:20:06] Kate Pluth: Uhhuh. And now
[00:20:07] Ty Magnin: you're like, you know, a permitted Yes thing.
[00:20:09] Ty Magnin: Yes. That's nice. Um, so that was really cool for us. And then another thing we did is that tiered approach. It's like we have three tiers. Yes. Tier one strategic content we did in house tier two. Still pretty important content. We would outsource it, but we would fund it. Right? So like came outta our budget.
[00:20:27] Ty Magnin: So I'm curious if you have something similar and tier three was like, we have no interest. Like, you know, here's some of prob agencies or like just have at it in the writer license came into play there too. Do you all fund, like the work that you can't get to, is that coming outta your bird?
[00:20:42] Kate Pluth: For things in integrated marketing where we still know it's something that's important for our integrated campaigns.
[00:20:48] Kate Pluth: Yeah.
[00:20:48] Ty Magnin: Right, right, right. You know, you have to get it done, so therefore it's gonna come outta.
[00:21:27] Ty Magnin: What are some of the biggest bottlenecks in content creation that you have today?
[00:21:31] Kate Pluth: We actually did a, we do an employee satisfaction survey a couple times a year, and the biggest thing that really came back from my team recently was. It's approvals and it's project management, which in some ways doesn't surprise me that if you've got content experts, the, the creation part actually should be pretty easy if you like, know your direction, but you know, in, in a larger company where people are using a bunch of different project management systems and every, you know, you've got a whole set of stakeholders who you know, need to be reviewing it.
[00:22:06] Kate Pluth: There's so many manual steps involved in like updating tickets and chasing things on, you know, chasing reviews on Slack and if a date slips, then having to like manually like update your whole work track schedule. And that is what I've been hearing loud and clear from the team over the last bit, that it's, if you really wanna humming content engine, you've gotta automate as much of that as you.
[00:22:29] Kate Pluth: Possibly can. In my first couple years Dropbox, I was dedicated to our e-signature product.
[00:22:35] Ty Magnin: Hello? Yeah. We use it.
[00:22:37] Kate Pluth: Yes. HelloSign. And that was renamed to Dropbox Sign. Um, we had a content team of two. And, uh, so we just did not have time to be doing any of that. Uh, and, uh, shout out to Corey on my team we're actually a case study with Airtable for what he was able to implement.
[00:22:54] Kate Pluth: Oh, wow. We tripled production with a flat budget. We had incredible business impact numbers because we just really dialed in the um. Our content operations. And to me what this all works backward from is the content calendar because everybody wants a content calendar. Everybody wants to know like, Hey, when is your content available?
[00:23:16] Kate Pluth: What are you working on? And like, when can I have it? Um, and. I have participated in trying to do the spreadsheet content calendar so many times, and it always is out of date immediately. People never, especially if it's a cross-functional one, people never add their stuff and so it within a week it's.
[00:23:36] Kate Pluth: Useless.
[00:23:37] Ty Magnin: Okay.
[00:23:38] Kate Pluth: Uh, so to me it's all about automating the content calendar because it works when it's connected to your work back flows and your standard operating procedures and your content types, and the campaigns that it might be part of, and the audience that it's for. Like all of your segmentation taxonomy, like all of those things, just like embed that.
[00:23:59] Kate Pluth: Create that system. Hmm. So that if a date moves, okay, it just updates in the calendar and people just know. And then if you have a question like, hey, like what do we have for, what content do we have for hr? Or what content do we have for. Our, you know, our AI product. You can just, you know, you can use all of that to like easily sift in and understand Right.
[00:24:23] Kate Pluth: That information.
[00:24:24] Ty Magnin: Right. That's nice. So that way you don't have to like, answer these one offs. You can just kind of point people to this.
[00:24:28] Kate Pluth: Yes. Yeah. And we're in, we're, yeah, we're in the, we're in the process. We're actually like really almost there. I'm so excited of, of finally like rebuilding that back up on a much bigger scale for Dropbox as a whole to be able to have that, that automated content calendar again and, uh.
[00:24:45] Kate Pluth: We'll have like Kanban views and everybody will have all their things and we're gonna connect it to Slack notifications so that people automatic notifications, they need to review things. I can't wait for the day when I can just like open up, open up our project and just see,
[00:25:03] Ty Magnin: yeah,
[00:25:04] Kate Pluth: this is what, uh.
[00:25:06] Ty Magnin: This
[00:25:06] Kate Pluth: is what I need to review today.
[00:25:07] Kate Pluth: Yeah, that's
[00:25:07] Ty Magnin: great. Uh, this is all Airtable like that's at the core of this one.
[00:25:11] Kate Pluth: Now we're not using Airtable now. Um, we're using a different tool now, but, um, you know, same, same. At this point, I don't even, I don't even care what project management tool it is. You just have to pick one and configure it.
[00:25:22] Tim Metz: It works and can, can automate what, what else is in your tech stack?
[00:25:26] Tim Metz: So I think we've talked about rider, we talked about the automated content calendar. Are there other important tools that you can't, you and your team can't really live without?
[00:25:34] Kate Pluth: Okay. There's one that I just kind of wanna talk about more philosophically that I think is so useful for any content team, but I don't see it used that often in B2B, which is digital listening.
[00:25:49] Kate Pluth: Whether that's a tool or whether that you do that with services, and I guess I will shout out to, to me, because we had a whole service around digital listening and I got very used to being able to have pull insights from Brandwatch and, you know, sprinkler and like those kinds of tools to be able to understand what is the audience conversation that's happening out there.
[00:26:11] Kate Pluth: Yeah. To be able to come up with the right kind of content ideas. So. Being able to leverage those kinds of tools, I think is increasingly important, especially because. With the way that platforms are changing with like, you know, whether it's like AI overviews or you know, any platform doesn't want you to link out and it's becoming all dark.
[00:26:30] Kate Pluth: It's, people spend a ton of their time on different social channels online and increasingly in forums and all of that. Like being able to see the conversations that are already happening there in aggregate and then figuring out what it's my right as a brand to participate in those conversations.
[00:26:46] Kate Pluth: That's the kind of way that you actually create differentiated content. Yeah.
[00:26:50] Ty Magnin: Well, and join the, join the conversation.
[00:26:52] Kate Pluth: Yeah. And join, yeah. Join the conversation in a credible way. That has been, that feels like a secret weapon almost. Yeah,
[00:26:59] Ty Magnin: it's great. Um,
[00:27:01] Kate Pluth: and when, when we've, when I've had that data in the past for my team, it has given us just an incredible runway to be able to have a consistent.
[00:27:10] Kate Pluth: Run. Yeah. Consistent flow of content ideas that are, that are really rooted in an audience need.
[00:27:15] Ty Magnin: I think especially for that team, the pod that's focused on timely, more news oriented, high frequency content. Right. I imagine that's a really important part of their motion.
[00:27:26] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Or I mean even for thought leadership too, it's like, well, if you wanna have a interesting differentiated take on AI today, it's so, it's so buzzy, but you have to be able to like ingest.
[00:27:37] Kate Pluth: All of that conversation and like figure out like where is there a place, you know, how and how is that evolving over time? Especially, especially with that, the conversation is just evolving constantly. Um, so you kind of have to stay on top of it in order to still feel relevant.
[00:27:54] Tim Metz: Why do, why do you think, to keep it a little bit philosophical, why, why do you think that is that not more content teams use such tools?
[00:28:02] Tim Metz: Do you think there's a reason for it?
[00:28:07] Kate Pluth: I don't know. And I actually, I will say, you know, I went to, I went to SparkToro's, um, event conference last year. SparkToro's a great tool, but they really skew towards smaller businesses. And maybe that's, that's an interesting thing that I think there's a lot of small businesses that can get really scrappy and do a lot of this themselves.
[00:28:27] Kate Pluth: But if you move into enterprises, it's, it's still a lot around those very traditional qual and quant studies.
[00:28:34] Ty Magnin: Hmm.
[00:28:35] Kate Pluth: Or just, you know, talking to customers, which is great to do and you should do all of it, but for whatever reason may, maybe it is that a lot of those, a lot of the tools like Sprinkler and Brandwatch and all of that are, are most often used for brand monitoring.
[00:28:50] Kate Pluth: And so comms and PR professionals are really dialed into that. And it's used a lot in B2C, but I love the premise of deploying that same idea, but profiling an audience.
[00:29:02] Ty Magnin: It's great. I, I also imagine it's gonna be more and more important with answer engine, uh, optimization tactics. You know, sort of, it's all about like your digital footprint.
[00:29:10] Ty Magnin: Uh, and so by participating in the con the relevant conversation now, I think you, you might gain some favor there, but again, like caveat is. I don't, I don't, I don't really know, like we're still figuring out answer engines, so,
[00:29:22] Tim Metz: well, I guess also now maybe with ai we can, as content teams respond faster maybe than we could in the past.
[00:29:28] Tim Metz: So if you're a little bit of a smaller team, sometimes you don't, just don't have the bandwidth to jump into certain things. Whereas now that becomes maybe more durable. So yeah, maybe that's the kind of tool, more people should look at it. Uh, even, even smaller teams.
[00:29:41] Ty Magnin: Can we talk a little bit more about how you're using AI at Dropbox?
[00:29:44] Ty Magnin: I mean, I understand that you have writer and there's a big. AI component to it. Uh, maybe help educate the audience on, uh, a little bit more on how you specifically are using, uh, writer or other AI tools.
[00:29:56] Kate Pluth: Well, I'm just, I'm so impressed with all of the ways that my team is finding to use ai, but in really thoughtful ways, not just completely outsourcing it, but using it.
[00:30:10] Kate Pluth: Just as a way to scale and to help them make them more efficient. Um, I'll give an example too. Our, our video producer, he's created a custom GPT that in, has pulled in all of his video project documents. And so not only is it something that he is using to like, help move the video along, but he asks it questions about like, hey, like what's the status of X, Y, Z?
[00:30:34] Kate Pluth: Or, you know, like he's actually just using it to help him like manage his time. And that's, that's where even, uh, Dropbox Dash, our Universal search, uh, product, I find is one of those ones that like helps me in ways around my day that that isn't as, it, like, it's not about the content generation always it, which it, but it can do that.
[00:30:58] Kate Pluth: But to me it's about all of those little paper cuts throughout the day that just add friction to focus. And take time away from focusing on my day. Yeah. The marketers and creatives haven't, aren't always implementing those as much, and I feel like there's gonna be a lot of opportunity around those kinds of things in the, in the operation space just to be able to, you know, organize our, our files in.
[00:31:22] Kate Pluth: Whether it's, that's a link or a file in a different way, um, you can just simply search control E and it just is like a universal search for all across all of your apps. And that's another one for me. Like I'm constantly sharing context with my team and being able to know that I actually don't have to have a huge proliferation of tabs anymore and I can just pull things up immediately and it gets it right.
[00:31:46] Kate Pluth: That's been a big, that's actually been a big habit change for me is being able to like better. Better access all of the company knowledge that we have and all of the background and context that we have, and be able to like redeploy that into our content projects more effectively and more efficiently.
[00:32:03] Tim Metz: Yeah, that's true. The, the, the, the internal ops is, uh, can take also so much time like looking for, so, you know, there's something somewhere and you wanna share it with somebody and then like you spend forever looking for it and, um, yeah. Yeah. There's so many little things. Yeah. See,
[00:32:17] Kate Pluth: and, you know, mark marketing is, there's so much about it that is just inherently unstructured.
[00:32:23] Kate Pluth: And so I think that there's, you know, there's a space where it's like, okay, apps and agents and create a system and create a workflow that's repeatable. But there are just things like too, if you wanna be experimenting with something new, there's just not a formula for that yet. And that's where something like Dash kind of fills the gap.
[00:32:38] Kate Pluth: Of just like, how do I pull all these things together and make something of it? Or how do I just keep track of all the things that we already know as a business?
[00:32:47] Ty Magnin: Let's talk about content KPIs. Ty's favorite topic? Yeah. Okay. King? Recently. Yeah. I think one of them, you know, you know, basketball content, KPIs.
[00:33:00] Ty Magnin: Um. Recently you did like the Content Connect event, right?
[00:33:04] Ty Magnin: Yeah. Was that
[00:33:04] Ty Magnin: last, and you had a, you did a course on, I dunno, workshop on, uh, kpi, like a KPI framework. Can you give us a little, little brief of that?
[00:33:14] Kate Pluth: Yes. In terms of a brief, I'm trying to remember. Well, Knotch has a really great framework to think about, like the, just the, the impact of your content and how to think about whether it's, um, high, high, um.
[00:33:28] Kate Pluth: Reach and a lot of visits versus actual engagement and where the things that are actually high reach, but low engagement actually is corrosive, could be corrosive to your brand.
[00:33:38] Speaker 3: Yeah, sure.
[00:33:39] Kate Pluth: It doesn't, can't just think that like, oh, just because it's getting a lot of traffic means that it's good. And that was a big, big topic of that talk.
[00:33:45] Kate Pluth: The way that, the other piece of that that I was kind of introducing, there was a lot of discussion in that session as well, um, where we kind of broke out. Talk to different people in the room about, Hey, what are, what are you working on and what, how might you apply KPIs to it? What be the right KPIs? And that's where I land at the end of the day, is there's no like one set of KPIs for content.
[00:34:07] Kate Pluth: The annoying answer is just, it depends because depending on your content initiative, it, it might be a different goal and maybe it just goes back to me being a psychology undergrad, this idea of, okay, there's subjective human behavior. And there are obviously things that people, you want people to do to engage with your business.
[00:34:31] Kate Pluth: How do you operationalize that behavior through a quantification, um, or a qualitative thing? But that's, that's what your KPI like, what behavior are you trying to indicate? And so I always, I think that is like a very helpful way to, to think about KPIs and think about crafting KPIs. Picking the right KPIs is like what?
[00:34:51] Kate Pluth: What is the behavior I'm trying to match with this? You know, that's where, for us right now, it's all about engagement. Okay? So if it's eng engage, like if someone's engaging with this content, if it's, if it's a video that's gonna be view through rate, if it's a, if it's a written article on a webpage, maybe that's bounce rate, maybe that's time on page, maybe that's scroll depth.
[00:35:15] Kate Pluth: Um, but it all just goes back to like, what's the indicator that somebody is actually finding this useful.
[00:35:21] Ty Magnin: Kind of reminds me of, do you know, uh, the folks over at Forget the Funnel, it's like a consultancy.
[00:35:26] Kate Pluth: Uh, no, but I read, um, Digital Relevance by RDA. Albe is kind of an older book now, but she has that same idea of just like, screw the funnel.
[00:35:36] Kate Pluth: It's not a funnel.
[00:35:38] Ty Magnin: Yeah. And whole philosophy is like map, map what the users do. You know, like, okay, so like what are they doing to sort of come into your. Funnel, and then what are the KPIs that they're taking? It's sort of just like flipping it honestly, like what are users doing, and then find the KPIs that actually match their behaviors.
[00:35:55] Ty Magnin: It's a little bit in line with what you're talking about because so often when we set the metrics, and I think this is what. You're trying to avoid here. It's like, what do I want them to do? It's like, well, I need them to like, you know, click this button, sign up for this thing. And of course those are gonna be KPIs, but for you, you're thinking about it more from a behavioral lens, I suppose.
[00:36:12] Ty Magnin: What are they doing and how can we find like a parallel metric that's resembling that closely? Right. Come getting it. Right. Where do you think we're heading with all this AI stuff, Kate? Final question.
[00:36:24] Kate Pluth: What I hope is that content teams then just to become the arbiters of taste in my LinkedIn feed. And over the last like month or two, the word taste has blown up.
[00:36:35] Ty Magnin: Sure.
[00:36:35] Kate Pluth: And that's been my big reservation. And in adopting ai, or not even reservation, but just in wanting to do it very thoughtfully and very ethically, is making sure that it's still in service of humans trying to connect with humans.
[00:36:52] Ty Magnin: Yeah.
[00:36:53] Kate Pluth: And the brand trying to like legitimately like, help a prospect, make an informed decision, help their customers, uh, get more value.
[00:37:01] Kate Pluth: So that's my, that's my hope. And that's, that's certainly how I am adopting ai.
[00:37:07] Ty Magnin: Yeah. Us too. Uh, yeah, for now, I mean, I, I think, you know, we keep asking each other this question, Tim and I, of like, is it possible that there is a. Type of content that you're producing for algorithms kind of like only, like, it's not really freaking, it's like for algos to then like parse and pull into their LLMs and then like feed back to someone when they're making a query.
[00:37:30] Ty Magnin: And we think increasingly, like the odds of that are there, are the, the, they're increasing odds of that being the case. I think there are always be the thought leadership thing, right? Like what we're talking about mostly. Uh, but. Maybe we are starting to see a wider separation between these two types of content,
[00:37:45] Kate Pluth: but that person who's still conversing with an LLM is they're still gonna wanna read something and they're still gonna want the right answer.
[00:37:52] Ty Magnin: Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. But I, the thought is like the content that you create for an LLM to sort of like parse and pull into something. Like, they're not gonna click through that most of the time. You just wanna give them the nuggets to see and then they're gonna like, yeah, go to drop boxes, whatever.
[00:38:07] Ty Magnin: Yeah, whatever.
[00:38:08] Kate Pluth: Exactly. Engage
[00:38:08] Ty Magnin: with the brand.
[00:38:09] Kate Pluth: But I, I, to me, that's just a continuation of a trend. Even we were already seeing with zero click that it's like, Instagram already wasn't letting you link out. YouTube was al. You already just wanted to watch your YouTube video platforms. Were already making this a pattern in our content consumption habits.
[00:38:29] Kate Pluth: LLMs to me are just like yet another one of those ways where people just want the information and the answer right there, and don't wanna have to be clicking through to a corporate website or any website for it.
[00:38:40] Tim Metz: That's a great insight to finish with. I think like LMS are just also zero click platforms.
[00:38:45] Tim Metz: Yeah. I never thought about it that way,
[00:38:47] Ty Magnin: but it's true. Hundred percent. Okay. Where can people follow along with, you know, uh, uh, with you or, or, uh, see what kind of content operations you're up to?
[00:38:58] Kate Pluth: Oh, great. Well, uh, I am a bit of a luer on LinkedIn, but you can find me there. And dropbox.com. When can I get Dash was plug?
[00:39:08] Kate Pluth: I
[00:39:08] Tim Metz: don't have it. How do I get it? When? When do I get it?
[00:39:11] Kate Pluth: Yeah. Contact sales and uh, stay tuned for the fall.
[00:39:14] Tim Metz: Alright, cool.
[00:39:15] Kate Pluth: Great.
[00:39:16] Tim Metz: Thanks so much, Kate.
[00:39:17] Kate Pluth: Thanks
[00:39:18] Ty Magnin: Tim. What are your notes from today?
[00:39:19] Tim Metz: Well, first of all, I love that she like kind of straight, even on the question of like, what content have you been consuming?
[00:39:24] Tim Metz: We kind of like, it started with like, okay, New York Times cooking, but then we got straight into like content systems and things like that. And, uh, I, yeah, I, that, that was the first kind of note I took in my head. Like, uh, the importance at the enterprise level of having. A good system. And the earlier guest also mentioned that, but she, Kate now also articulated that again of like, yeah, you know, if you, I mean she didn't literally say that, but it's true.
[00:39:45] Tim Metz: It's like when you have like a little blog, it's like, ah, you can kind of manage, right? But then you get the enterprise level. It's like the system actually starts to make such a difference. And if you, if you can operate it, how much time it costs you and also the quality in a way, like if you can't manage it well then it just becomes impossible.
[00:40:00] Tim Metz: And, uh, we didn't really talk about how she does this at Dropbox, but then there also, she clearly. Has thought a lot about how to structure things. She mentioned the automated content calendar and all these kind of things. So how important the operations get like at the enterprise, enterprise scale.
[00:40:15] Ty Magnin: Yeah, I fully agree.
[00:40:16] Ty Magnin: Um, that was my big takeaway too. It's like how much Kate is thinking about the system or the engine or the operating model call what you want of content for Dropbox. So I'd say yes in terms of her team structure and those pods in terms of the tech stack and how that plays out. And then also. Beyond the integrated marketing team, the content team that she runs, you know, help fits into the larger organization with other teams that are also creating content.
[00:40:42] Ty Magnin: She's definitely one of the more systems thinking content leaders that I, we've had the privilege of chatting with, or at least like that came out really clearly in in today's conversation.
[00:40:52] Tim Metz: I also like this idea of like, 'cause we are talking about this a bit as well, like where you have. Teams, or in her case than polls, but that are like kind of working on different cycles.
[00:41:02] Tim Metz: Like you have one team that is, you know, she's like more with the running experiments, she needs to do A/B test, like email ad copy. They, so they have to quickly like change things and then she has a separate poll where people are thinking more about, like, I don't, she called it, I mean I would call it kind of editorial educational contents.
[00:41:17] Tim Metz: Use the another word for experienced content. That are on a different rhythm. And then you have the thought leadership kind of pulled that are focused on that. They have to work with the executive team and things like that. I think that's a really smart way to think about it, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
[00:41:30] Tim Metz: Like you can't just fit all contents to the same kind of team and workflow anymore. You know, for your company that structure might look slightly different, but I do think you need like different approaches and different workflows for, uh, and, and different reactive times of like your publishing cadence and things
[00:41:45] Ty Magnin: like that.
[00:41:46] Ty Magnin: A hundred percent. I also. We didn't dig into it too much, but the fact that she has video folk on at least two of those four pods is interesting. I haven't had a chance to check out all the video that Dropbox does, um, but makes sense in terms of the way we think content's heading in the coming years.
[00:42:03] Ty Magnin: They're ahead of it a bit.
[00:42:04] Tim Metz: I like the insight at the end, which kind of came out by accident, I think, but it, like LMS are also just zero click platforms.
[00:42:09] Ty Magnin: Thanks all for tuning in and listening to another episode of the Animalz podcast. Uh, we'll follow up in another few days and, uh, keep going on this journey with y'all.
[00:42:17] Ty Magnin: Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
