Welcome to the first issue of Sleight of Brand! I’m so happy you’re here.

Today I’m sharing my conversation with Jason Tanz, former executive editor at Wired and current Editor-in-Chief at Lyft. If you want to learn from a seasoned journalist making excellent content for one of the world’s most recognizable brands, well, you should read it.

A quick intro before we dive in:

• I’m Megan, a journalist-turned-content-marketer who specializes in B2C branded content.

• I started this newsletter because I don’t see a lot of resources specifically for B2C content creators and directors.

• This newsletter is for anyone who works in branded content, is curious about content for their own B2C or personal brand, and my mom. Hi, Mom!

• You’ll get a new issue every other week, and you can follow me on LinkedIn for cheesy jokes and more discussions about content marketing and journalism.

Table of Contents

• Welcome!

• My chat with Jason Tanz, Editor-in-Chief of Lyft

• What I’m reading / watching / listening to

My chat with Jason Tanz, Editor-in-Chief of Lyft

Imagine you’re a tech journalist and you have direct access to the data, brain power and resources of one of the biggest rideshare companies in the world. That’s what Jason Tanz gets to do as the Editor-in-Chief for Lyft.

Jason spent 11 years at Wired, as an editor, writer, executive editor and digital strategist. He was a Special Projects Editor at Apple News when the opportunity at Lyft came to him, and he couldn’t resist jumping back into hands-on editorial work for a brand he admired.

I spoke to Jason about why Lyft lured him to the branded content world, launching Rev, a new vertical for the brand, and the secret to unlocking unique data stories.

[The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

What brought you to the EIC position at Lyft?

Lyft was a brand that I always valued. I use Lyft; I had written about Lyft when I was at Wired. And I understood that it was a purpose-driven brand. It wasn't just about a product or a service. Lyft's whole thing is, we want to solve big problems. So it was all about the future. It was always about big ideas. And it felt like there were a lot of big meaty themes to chew on. 

When I started talking to them about the job, I would think to myself, do I believe that there is enough good material here? Do I believe that I can create something interesting? There's nothing wrong with writing press releases, but that’s not what motivates me. I kind of imagined, what if I were working at Wired, and Lyft came to me and said, Hey, we're going to open up our company to you. Let you dig around and get into our data, you can talk to our product managers, you can talk to our executives, I would think, wow, there are all kinds of cool stories I might be able to tell. So that's what convinced me that this could be a good opportunity. 

The content is often derived from Lyft data, which I think is really smart. Especially in the age of AI slop, proprietary data is crucial. Can you tell me about your approach to mining that data for story ideas?

We unlocked that by hiring a data editor, Sarah Conlisk. Before that, we were working with existing staff to help us find data, but it was always the fifth thing on their agenda. Eventually, we realized we've got to hire a data editor. And we were really lucky to hire Sarah who is both a brilliant data mind and a great writer. 

We have these brainstorms where we're just like, hey, what can we learn from looking at the data around ice cream? Or, I wonder if there's a town with only one Lyft driver? That's my favorite story we've done and it started with Sarah digging through and looking for towns that only had one Lyft driver. And we ended up finding this amazing character and this amazing story of this town. 

We tend to look for stories that ask, what can Lyft data tell us about the larger world, about how people are moving around?

Do you have a set editorial calendar or content pillars? How do you determine what niches or topics you're going to dive into, week to week?

A lot of that comes down to our company's priorities, and tentpole moments that we want to orient around. We don't just do product announcements, but they can suggest themes that we might want to talk about. 

When we launched Women+ Connect, which is a preference setting for women and non-binary drivers and riders, we started talking about the importance of having women in the C suite, and the role that they played in ideating this. 

And creating this product, we also talked about the outsized importance that the flexibility of rideshare and the gig economy has as an earning opportunity for caregivers, who are primarily women. So that's an example of how a product can inspire a slate of content. 

How do you measure success of a story? What are your KPIs?

Coming from traditional media, I know that you can't judge things on a story by story basis. Some stories don't take off – it doesn't mean the story was a failure. It may mean you have to publish a certain number of stories to get the ones that take off. You can’t only do the hits, it's not possible. 

So most of the KPIs that I look at are about building an audience for what we're doing. Sometimes that means doing great content that our audience responds to. And sometimes it means finding new platforms to explore and grow the possibility space for our audience. 

For example, we started with a LinkedIn page for Rev. And then eventually, happily, we ended up running the Lyft brand LinkedIn; the social team was more focused on other platforms. We started publishing a newsletter on LinkedIn, and then we wanted to get off platform. So we now publish a MailChimp newsletter and some of our KPIs are around the growth of that newsletter, which has been great. 

We have growth KPIs there while preserving our open rate, which we've been able to do. So we're really proud of that. And then we also have reach KPIs, make sure we're getting out there as much as we can. Sometimes we publish our stories through the app and our in-ride feed. And that gets us a ton of impressions. 

The challenge – and this I think is true for anyone who works in brand content – is how do you walk that line between providing value for your employer, and communicating something that's important for the company to get across, while providing something that's legitimately of value, and not just selling something, to a reader. We always think of our work as living inside that Venn diagram. And again, I came to Lyft because I believe that intersection is actually pretty large. 

The Lyft social team is also doing great work. How do you work with that team?

We're always looking for new platforms and new ways of reaching a broader audience. And so we worked really hard, over the last eight months or so, to set up a process through which we can contribute to brand social as well. We're still kind of young in that, but I’m a huge fan of everybody on that team, they're all brilliant, and they do a lot of stuff that we would never be able to do. 

But there was this idea that some of what we do for Rev could be of interest to that audience. Is there a brand social way of telling data stories as opposed to a more traditional Rev way of doing it? As an example, my team just shot a video going around San Francisco to eat Lyft riders’ five favorite burritos. We don't do the exact same thing as they do, but they advise us on how to make our stuff work for their channels. 

How do you create stories that stand out on the internet?

It’s not all that different from the way I used to think about stuff at Wired, which is, it should be a story that nobody else could write, because no one else has the data we have. Because we are within this company, people at Lyft speak freely to us and express themselves a lot more candidly than they might to an outside journalist. And so we are capable of getting insights and stories that other people wouldn't. 

We did a big story where we got to show visualizations of how people rebalance the Citi Bike system. We did another story on building Lyft Maps, where I was able to talk to all the engineers. Those are my favorite kinds of stories, the ones that wouldn't exist if we weren't writing them.

From your perspective, why do you think that Lyft is investing in this content?

I think stories are ways of getting the brand in people's minds, on an ongoing basis. It's hard to keep people's attention when all you're doing is talking about product launches, right? Because there's a lot of stuff that happens between those product launches, or between big company moments. It's also hard when all you're doing is telling people about your company in a way that implies something transactional. 

We’re building an audience around the values that we care about. You have an audience that you're reaching with engaging information that presumably they value and feel good about. You're communicating what your brand is about. 

But also, when you do have some big important moment that you want to communicate to people, that audience is there for you. So you know, our audience includes our entire press list. It includes policymakers, it includes all these really important opinion shapers that have a lot of influence over our brand. And so if all we say is, look how great we are, they're not going to read it. But if we tell them the stories they want us to tell, we can also tell them the stories that we need them to hear, too.

If a brand came to you and said, we're on the fence about starting our own branded publication, what should they consider to push them one way or the other?

They need to ask, how are we going to reach audiences? In some ways, content creation is the easy part. The question is, how are you going to help this team reach its readership?

If we were starting Rev today, and we were just launching our own little LinkedIn channel and that’s all that we had, we would not still be here. We are here because we had a certain amount of budget for paid promotion, and we were able to collaborate with brand social, we were able to use the in-ride feed, we could utilize the company's other assets to reach as broad an audience as possible. When we have a big story, the comms team will pitch it out, or our content will work its way into our earning statements.

It's easy to think of branded content as a channel. But I would really encourage people to think of it as a cross-channel function. Storytelling is important. Telling your own stories, being proactive about finding your own voice is a better thing than having your voice thrust upon you. 

What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to work in branded content?

I think the connection to the brand really, really matters. Just know yourself, know what your interests are. It could be product writing, that's great. It could be anything. But I do think it's hard to do this unless you have a real sense of how you and your voice fits into the organization and where it belongs. Because you do have to explain yourself a lot. So you need to be clear with yourself about what the vision for this publication is, what the voice should be, and how it fits the brand. Because this falters when it doesn't quite fit the brand, or you don't have the fire in the belly to make the good stuff.

What I’m reading / watching / listening to

Because a marketer is only as good as their creative inputs.

BRANDED CONTENT 🧃 Keeping It Private: Retailers Open Their Doors to Private Label Brands (Creative Circle) Interesting trends showing an increase in private label brands on shelves, which is also presenting more opportunity for creative positioning of these brands.

FICTION 📖 Kala, by Colin Walsh. I love a thriller set in Ireland. The dialect alone is a masterclass in writing well-rounded characters and anchoring the story to a place. There’s also some great interplay with POV of different characters – some in first person and some in second person.

NONFICTION 📖 The Future is Analog: How to Create a More Human World, by David Sax. This was written rrrrrrright before generative AI took over the landscape. I’m really digging it so far and hoping that Sax might write a sequel or a new edition.

BLOG POST 💻 The Smarter-Not-Harder Guide to Content Marketing in 2024, by Amanda Natividad for SparkToro

TV SHOW 📺 Fargo, Season 5. Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jon Hamm give impeccable performances. Really everyone does. The cinematography is outstanding. So is the music.

PODCAST 🎧 Hysterical, the latest investigative endeavor from Dan Taberski, examines mass pyschogenic illnesses, centered on the one that swept through the teenage girls of LeRoy, New York in 2011. I wish that Taberski challenged some of the interview subjects a bit more, but I get what he’s doing and he does it well.

Did a smart friend forward you this newsletter? Subscribe to get the next issue in your inbox!

Do you know someone who wants to read this post?

I want to hear from you!

Who else in the branded content world should I interview? What other sections would you like to see? What are YOU reading / watching / listening to? (Should we abbreviate this to R/W/L??)

Reply to this email to tell me what you think! 📧

LYLAS,
Megan