Melanie Deziel: The Content Fuel Framework

Jason S. Bradshaw: Creativity is not magic. It's a system and trust. It's not earned by talking. It's earned by proving. Today you're about to meet someone who has mastered both. Welcome back to Chats with Jason. I'm your host, Jason S. Bradshaw, and this is where leaders come when they want to create work that stands out and experiences that create raving fans.

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Jason S. Bradshaw: Today's guest has helped some of the biggest brands on the planet unlock creativity at scale and build trust that lasts.

Melanie Deziel is one of the most respected creative strategists in the world. She was the first editor of branded content at the New York Times. She's helped build the brand storytelling engine of HuffPost, and she led creative strategy for 35 major media titles at Time Inc.

Melanie, welcome to the show.

Melanie Deziel: Thanks for having me. I feel like my bio sounds better when you read it. I might just bring you along with me everywhere now.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Absolutely. Well, I know you get to go to some amazing events across the world, so I'm happy to carry the luggage and do the onstage intro for you.

Melanie Deziel: Sounds good.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So let's start off with what I hope's a simple question. If you were to open a nine year old's backpack and using only what's inside it, can you explain what you do for a living?

Melanie Deziel: So to clarify, am I explaining to the 9-year-old or am I explaining to grownups using the 9-year-old supplies?

Jason S. Bradshaw: Let's explain it to a 9-year-old.

Helping people think differently so they can come up with cooler ideas and make things that they're proud of.

Jason S. Bradshaw: I think that sounds pretty cool, and as an adult I would like to be able to do it.

Now you've called yourself a creative systems architect, and you've just talked about, helping people think differently. What does being a creative system architect actually mean? It feels like the growing up version of what you just told us.

So I like to say that I'm really looking at creative systems and then building or rebuilding them to help make them more efficient.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And your first book really was the catalyst for that on a world stage, at least beyond your work doing the work you earning the right to be a thought leader in this space.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah.

Jason S. Bradshaw: How do you think your first book The Content Fuel Framework has changed how teams brainstorm? What problem were you trying to solve when you wrote the book?

Melanie Deziel: I'm going to answer them in reverse, I think. Probably makes more sense that way.

I teach a gamified version of it so The Content Fuel Framework is a 10 by 10 matrix with different topics and types of content you could create on one side, and then different formats you could use to bring it to life on the other side.

And I mean, my goal is just to make it more fun. I think a lot of times coming up with content feels like a burden because of how many channels we have to program and you know how many messages we have to share. So hearing that teams are getting together and actually having fun coming up with the content ideas is like the best to me.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah makes sense to me.

Melanie Deziel: I think there's a lot of reasons. A big one just being the day-to-day grind, right? Like we're for many people the task of coming up with content again to program all these disparate channels is something that was added on to an existing role before a lot of these tools were even around. You're being tasked with far more work than before, and in many cases, we're working with not as many resources as we'd like. So I think there's the exhaustion of just the volume of what we have to come up with. Oh my God, another email we have to send another one. Didn't we just do that yesterday? It just starts to get exhausting.

And I think there's also just a lot of constraints that we're under. Sometimes it's hard to be creative when you may have communication issues within a team. You may have someone with a stakeholder with a different viewpoint that's vetoing or putting things, taking them off track. All those things get in the way of trying to produce something that you're proud of and you actually wanna share with your audience.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So you've shared with us that part of why your system can be so successful is because it brings fun back into the creative process. What's another way that your system helps build that creativity into the workplace so that it doesn't become just another task?

I need this one thing that I have to put out on Wednesday, or whatever the case may be. And that often forces us to think format first. It's an email or it's a video. It's a podcast. And when we do that, we tend to shoehorn things that would be better expressed in a different format, but we're shoving them into that format because we started with that box and now we're just trying to fill it. And the system that I share teaches you to start with the idea, like what is it that we actually wanna say? What's the focus of this story or this piece of content? And then let's figure out how we might bring it to life in different formats. I think that allows the content to be more strategic. But again, it also just encourages us to break out of the norm a little bit because if we're just yet another video idea, yet another email idea, we tend to just repeat things that we've done in the past when we're starting with a new prompt. What if we told this story through data instead of, audio? Or what if we told this story through the lens of [00:09:00] history instead of through the lens of our product? It gets you thinking in a different way and that alone is a bit of a freedom, right? 'Cause you're being told explicitly to think about it differently.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And if I was to take an extension of that, what I'm hearing is it's okay for the content to be different across platforms, and I say that because quite often people are like we're just going to post the same thing on every platform and it's gonna land, it's gonna work on everything, but perhaps that's not right.

What's your take on that?

We could also talk about it through the lens of people. And we know that video and interview is gonna perform better maybe on something like TikTok, where we can talk to the people that we're working with. Oh, we've gotta share it on Instagram and we've gotta share it on Pinterest too. Okay let's look and see what compelling imagery we can get.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot.

Now, you've probably get asked this question more times than that you like, but the reality is AI is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and it's definitely the buzzword of the year. How do you find AI in this creative process?

So I'm not afraid of it as a replacement for creative work. I'm afraid for the people who think it's a replacement for their creative work. And I think there's certainly gonna be growing pains for those of us who do creative work as people learn the hard way that it's not a replacement. But it really it can be a great supporting tool. It can be something that you use.

There's a lot of ways that the tools available can help you find gaps, improve the work. Test react based on a profile of your audience and give you some insight into how it might perform. Competitive analysis to inform your content. There's so many things you can do that are not wholesale content creation but I think those are gonna be the folks who get ahead, who are using it strategically as a partner rather than as a replacement.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, yeah. I really like that approach. It it is more of enhancing our work and our authentic work than trying to create authenticity, which is how a lot of people are using Chat GPT at the moment I think.

Melanie Deziel: And it reminds me of a lot of other tools that like we've come to use too. I know those of us of a certain age, remember when we were told that like using a calculator was gonna make it so that you couldn't think anymore. You know what I mean?

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, yeah. They still teach math in school for a reason. It's and side note, very different teachings to, to head to when I was at school. So I'm showing my age, but no one plus one is still two, at least in 2025. So can you give us an example of a team who went from being stuck to unstoppable after applying your system framework?

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, yeah. It's one of the pros and cons of the work that we do, especially when we're under NDAs. We can't talk about the specifics, but we always love to know when the work's really landed and delivered that result. So if a leader's listening today and they don't have the money to have you come and work with them straight away, what's one thing that they could do? What's the very first step, if you will, that they could do to help their teams be more creative?

So if you are finding that stagnation of we're just doing the same stuff, we're not taking enough risk. Step number one is to separate the divergent time when we're coming up with our ideas and the refining time, the convergent time when we're bringing reality back in. And usually you can do that. I prefer if you could sleep on it. Have the building one [00:19:00] day and then the refining the next day so you can let things marinate for a little bit. But even if it's just splitting your same exact brainstorm in half and explicitly saying, this is the Yes, And time. I don't care if it's a good idea. I don't care if it's a perfect idea. I don't care if it's in budget. Let's talk about what the best solution would be here. And then at a designated point, we will then switch to how do we take that awesome ideal and bring it into a level that's achievable. That's a much better way to get somewhere.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I really like the idea of the Yes, And ...just building on things before we, because it's so easy to get into the why it won't work as opposed to trying to find the way it could.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, so before we jump into the next section of the show today what do you say to the person who says, I'm just not creative.

And so we become afraid to suggest things that aren't possible or that aren't guaranteed to work. And that is really what inhibits creativity. So you are totally creative. You absolutely are. You've just been trained to imagine how things won't work out because that's the self-protection that you need to survive in this world.

So it's something that requires conscious, overriding to remind yourself like, I'm actually really good at imagining outcomes. I'm really good at predicting possibilities at thinking of these things. I've just been trained to focus on the wrong prompt, and that means you can retrain to focus on the correct one.

Jason S. Bradshaw: I don't think I've ever heard anyone respond to that question like that before, and I think it's brilliant. Like you can't argue. There is no arguing with that.

Melanie Deziel: Yep.

So let's shift to trust we know that trust is collapsing everywhere.

Melanie Deziel: Absolutely.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Your book prove, it hits this notion on the head. Why do you think trust is so hard to earn today?

Melanie Deziel: A lot of it comes back to what we were talking about earlier with AI. And that hasn't always been the case. That's more so in the last couple years, but even going back ten years or so, right? When we started to get filters happening on people's faces on the internet, we started to get Photoshop that you couldn't trust a photo was actually real anymore, right? We started to get more sophisticated video editing. We started to get deep fakes, right? Like the more advanced technology has gotten, the less trustworthy media in front of us has become. And that's just a fact, right? This is not political. It's not divisive. It's just a fact. Like you cannot trust the things that you see anymore because there are more ways than ever to fabricate things.

And that's not a crazy conclusion to come to, given all these things that you're exposed to. I mean that I think acknowledging that reality is actually one of the best things you can do as a marketer, as a communicator, as a business owner. Acknowledging that nobody trusts anything you're saying because it's actually really freeing to know that you have to back it up. You have to back it up. And that's an incredible opportunity because nobody's doing it. Everybody is continuing to go out and say, my product is the best. I'm gonna get you results. Everything's amazing. You can trust us. Nobody is proving that they should, and so that's an incredible opportunity, but you do have to acknowledge that reality first of saying it is just not enough anymore. You've gotta back it up.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So what's an easy way for a business to start proving it as opposed to just saying it?

So take those things you're already doing, whether it's testimonials or case studies, or reviews, ratings that you're featuring and really dial it up. Let's talk to that person. Let's find out what solution they were looking for and what did they try that didn't work. Let's expand it into a story that is so much more rich, so much more relatable, so much more detailed, that it's a lot more trustworthy than simply a half of a name and a sentence or two. Now yes, can people make up whole personalities and whole businesses... yeah, of course they can. But it's a lot [00:25:00] easier to put a fake, a stock photo and a first name last initial than it is to come up with a full story where you're talking to customers. You're talking to people. You're bringing in quotes. It becomes much more substantial.

So take those reviews, ratings, case studies, testimonials that you already have, and dial it up to a hundred. Pick one or two and really go in deep, find out why they like working with you. What worked. What they tried before that didn't work. What the difference has been since they started working with you. Like really get into the weeds of what that testimonial really means, and give people something to grab onto.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So a lot of our listeners lead departments far outside marketing... HR, finance, operations, what's the one framework or the one tip that you have for them that can help their teams either be more creative? Prove it more?

You are good at something. And you are good at something that is necessary for the success of this business. And being able to help people understand how to do that better, not only showcases your expertise and makes you look more trustworthy, like clearly this person knows what they're doing, if they're showing others how to do it. It empowers you to recognize your own expertise, to be seen as a subject matter expert. And again, it shows people that you're worthy of trust because you're giving them the secret sauce. You're giving them the recipe for success, rather than just saying, trust me, this is how you do it. Don't ask further questions.

So I think seeing how can I teach people, how can I help people understand what I do, is a good way to start to explore what opportunities might be right around you.

Explaining how to do a particular process. Explaining why something is done a certain way. Instead of writing that same email every single time, is there a way for you to put together some documentation? An FAQ page. Do a screen share, and walk through how to do something, right? So that proactively you can say, Hey, I know you're filling out your onboarding paperwork for the first time. A lot of times people wonder about how to do the 401k enrollment. So I put together this little video for you just in case that's what you encounter. That person immediately whoa. They know what they're doing. They're proactively caring about other people. This is someone I can go to when I have a problem because they are actively trying to help me fix it.

So those little things, just like an HR example, you can find those ways to use educational content to build that relationship and also showcase your expertise at the same time.

Melanie Deziel: This is something that could go a lot of different ways, I think the idea of separating your divergent and convergent thinking can actually work really well throughout your life. Now it is something you have to do consciously, right? 'cause again, our systems, efficiency tells us we should just try to build the idea and refine it at the same time. But this could work for something as simple as what are we having for dinner tonight? Because it's always I suggest this. I don't like that. How about this? No, I don't want that. And it's the back and forth, right? The building and refining at the same time. And you never get resolution. Instead, like, alright, let's just write down each of us, write down five things we might like to have for dinner tonight. Then you can veto and then go with what's left, right? You, instead of chopping off one at a time, you've got a list you can refine.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, yeah, let's stop writing and editing at the same time. We'll have a lot full of lives, I think, and also greater results at the end of the work that we're working on.

Melanie, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah. Thanks for having me and let me share my story.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And everyone listening, remember this, when you transform the experience, you transform the business and the world around you.

I'm Jason S. Bradshaw, and this has been another edition of Chats with Jason.