# 400 How to deliver sustainable and eco-friendly marketing - an Interview with Megan Thudium
How to deliver sustainable and eco-friendly marketing - an Interview with Megan Thudium
Marketing, as any business activity, must become sustainable, eco-friendly, carbon-neutral. How to deliver this change and still be successful with your marketing efforts?
Megan Thudium knows how to do it. In this interview she answered Niels Brabandt’s questions.
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More on this topic in this week's podcast: Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the podcast transcript, read below.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
You probably all heard of marketing. And, you know, marketing convinces you to do this or to do that or to buy this item, and it produces lots of material, paper, print, anything. And often you can say, is marketing actually something which is doing something good on the planet, or is marketing something where we say it's more of a burden to this planet? And we have someone who knows how to do marketing right. Hello and welcome, Megan Thudium, the owner of Content for Good and Co. Hello.
Megan Thudium
Hello. Thank you so much for inviting me to the podcast.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much for taking the time. So first, I just have, one very important question. When we look at marketing and and the perception that most people have, and I include myself here, Marketing wants me to convince they want to convince me to do something, to buy something, to go to a certain brand. And by doing that, they're using different materials, often print or online, but they still care about me putting money towards other people and influence me in the way that I do what they want. How can marketing be used as a force of good in the world in your opinion?
Megan Thudium
Yep. So this is a very important topic. It's it's my love topic, what I'm working on on at the moment. Marketing can be a force for good by taking the time to sit back and rethink how we are approaching marketing.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm.
Megan Thudium
Just the way that the business as a force for good movement is developing with the b corp movement. If we look at the focus small on marketing, specifically, marketing has traditionally been used to encourage accelerated buying behaviors, overconsumption. There's a lot of biases and negativity that goes into marketing. Marketing is already doing a lot of good. I don't wanna give it all a bad name, but there's a lot of things that we can work on. And so that's the idea of the marketing as a force for good movement is thinking about our different marketing disciplines. You know, we're in performance marketing.
We're in content marketing, whatever it may be. The leadership, how can we use that influence internally to drive good in the world?
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. So when I when I now get straight to the point here, let's talk about the social and especially the environmental impact of marketing and advertising. Let's say I'm going for a content strategy. I'm using something in print. Maybe I put something online, then I use an AI on top of that to distribute it somewhere. All of that consumes resources on the planet, and especially energy resources. And especially with AI, these are energy resources which are energy heavy.
That does not mean that I get guaranteed results, but I still try to use the kind of marketing to convince my customers. So how can I deal with the social and environmental impact of marketing and advertising and still say I'm doing something good and not just lie in my own pockets?
Megan Thudium
Yep. So let's look at AI content at the moment because it's kind of the biggest elephant in the room for us to address. It has both environmental and social impacts. One of the biggest environmental impact is the amount of energy consumption that it actually uses. And if you dive into this, it's crazy how Microsoft and Google are having to open up these these infrastructures to just process all this AI data. So all of that is energy consumption, and that energy consumption isn't necessarily renewable. So that's one of the biggest environmental impacts.
On the social side, thinking about, okay, we have an overflux of content now on the Internet. It's definitely not all good content if you ask me on the AI front. So now we're all overwhelming people even more with Influx, and are we actually achieving our goals? So that's kind of the social thought of what is the conscious impact, on a, you know, on a well-being level of how AI contact is flooding the market.
Niels Brabandt
So when we talk about AI, let's let's stick with that topic for a while. The companies were bombarding me straight from the very beginning when AI became a trend, and I just I I just spoke about Leechob and AI in a conference, a pharmaceutical conference in Bristol yesterday. And many people say we can now create our content with AI, and they create tons of content, many of which I consider because I tried just to test it to produce some content that I usually create with an AI. And in my opinion, it was very middle of the road, bit all over the place, very bland, didn't make decisive statements. It was some content, but in my opinion, not very good content. While at the same time, it has a way heavier carbon footprint on this planet than me sitting in front of Microsoft writing something. So how do I find the right balance between AI generated content to help me and writing my own content to actually get the message out there?
Megan Thudium
Yep. Yep. I think this is where we need to move on the ethical ness of AI. How can we ethically use AI in our content process and our content jobs? I think one of the first places for us to start is defining what is the actual what is the usage of AI? How do we want to use it to, improve progress and, accelerate how we do content in our in our everyday job? In my opinion, it should not be used to create the content necessarily.
I think this is the misconception we have going on right now. People think, oh, you know, the whole idea of a content strategy is just to throw out as much content out there as possible. That's how you define growth. Well, we could talk about that more, but in my opinion, that is not true because the way and the reason we create content is to support and benefit our target audience. And by doing that, we understand them on an intimate and an empathetic level to create content for them specifically.
Can AI do that yet? No. It can't because it doesn't have that level of understanding of your audience that necessarily you would as the marketer as you are developing that. And, hopefully, as a marketer, you're developing that. Now can you train the robot to be on that level? Yes. I do think we're going to go in that direction.
But should we be doing that in the sense of producing all the content? I think we might get here one day where, for example, we're producing the content that's specific towards the the audience and specific towards their pains and even specific towards the tone. We're already moving in that direction very quickly. I think the basis is you're always gonna have a have to have a marketer there to control that robot and the right and ethical direction. That's always gonna be something we need to consider. I also think we need to consider, what is the best usage of it? You know, we're talking about writing content. Yes. That will, like, cut down the the overall workload of your but there's still a lot of better content that comes out than the robot.
So what are some other places we could use AI? We could use it, for example, in generating the outline, so speeding up the production or the repurposing of content. So that's where I think the conversation needs to go around AI content, broaden our perspective. Maybe it wasn't created just to blast everybody with more content. We shouldn't be moving in that direction anyway if we look at it from a sustainable perspective.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm. How
Megan Thudium
can we use it instead to make it more efficient? How can we make our our jobs more efficient, and how can we make that content more impactful moving forward with AI.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent points. Excellent points here.
And I saw something that you, you stand up for, and that is something that that is a term which I find highly interesting. Low carbon content strategy for digital marketers.
Let's face it. When you approach a company, no company will ever say, oh, finally, someone comes along with marketing. We never tried that. You approach companies which say, we figured it out. We know the way. We know how to do it, and it works. And now you want to reduce something and low carbon, of course, should not mean low result on the balance sheet.
So how is it possible to have a low carbon content strategy for digital marketers in in today's time, which is heavily relying on digital marketing and social media, while the competition is out there maybe not doing that?
Megan Thudium
Yep. So this comes down to, again, the principles we have been following in content marketing for over ten years now or more is how what makes good content, understanding your audience, making it relevant, defining those pain points. That is still the basis of what makes great content great. And by doing that process and narrowing into those type of approaches, you're actually, already doing a low a low content, a low carbon approach to content because you're not creating 10 pieces of content that might work. You're instead of creating one to three pieces that you know will really work.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm.
Megan Thudium
And that's where you're bridging, the benefits of sustainability with content marketing and the and the perspective of, okay, you're gonna use less resources, of course, but it's also gonna be less money. You don't have to pay, for example, for all that AI content to be produced and created. You could just focus in on the few.
You could, for example yeah. I think those are the big ones. But, yeah, this is the direction that we definitely need to be moving.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. Well, now someone's listening to this podcast and says, look. I I'm sitting in a company, and I think what you say is a really good idea. However, I am not the CMO of the company. I work in my department of marketing. I really want to do what you say here, but I just don't know how to start. So when people now get intrigued by what you say, how do you think they can get started to get some interest?
Because you always know people prefer. That's just the default bias that we have in psychology. People prefer to do things the way they did that before because there is no risk when you did the same and you say it didn't work. You can always blame someone else. When you change things, you run the risk of saying, hey. We changed something, and it didn't work. So how can people convince others to follow the path that you are now leading?
Megan Thudium
So there will always have to be a level of bravery and innovation. I mean, we know in business that the top innovators and the creative thinkers are the people who win out and who are able to remain competitive on a long term business scale. Our business world in general is is changing quickly, from a sustainable perspective. Consumers and citizens are demanding more sustainability from the brands that they buy from. If you just look at that piece alone, you need to be changing your marketing to make it more attractive to develop the profit that you're looking for. So the world is changing and you better get to it. I I don't have another deeper answer for that.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm.
Megan Thudium
It just the question right now with everything going on is how quickly is it going to change? And there's a lot of opinions based on that. So in marketing, if you wanna remain competitive, you need to know how to market your products honestly and ethically without greenwashing if you're doing sustainable products. But, also, as the market develops and they, for example because the low carbon impact that I'm seeing is part of your greater sustainability strategy. So if consumers are saying, well, I only wanna buy from sustainable companies. They need to have a sustainable strategy. Well, marketing is coming really soon that they are going to be the ones in scope three that are generating all these emissions that we haven't quite figured out yet, you know, are not part of the big conversation, but is quickly coming.
So very quickly, the marketing department is now gonna be under the lens that, okay. Now your sustainability director is coming to you and saying, we need to start working on scope three. These are all your impacts, you know, in content, in AI, in whatever, all your different marketing disciplines. Get to it. We need to start, you know, lowering this impact. That's coming.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. And especially in today's world, people always take a close look if you do greenwashing, and then they will turn away. And, of course, they care about true sustainability. When people now say, okay. I am looking I'm I'm looking for someone to help me here. How can people get in touch with you, maybe read something that you publish? Is there any way they can reach out to you?
Megan Thudium
Absolutely. So the best way to get contact with me is to follow me on LinkedIn under my name, Megan Thudiam. I post content every day about sustainable marketing. I also run a YouTube channel on sustainable marketing. You can find it also through my name. And I post again on low carbon impact content strategy and also sustainable marketing.
Niels Brabandt
Brilliant. And one thing I'd like to add is because we have international listenership here. As far as I know, you are from California, so you have all The US expertise, but now you're based in Berlin. So after you so you have the European perspective as well for more than a decade now. So you can give us the best of both worlds. Right?
Megan Thudium
Yes. I have been working in both markets. Also, what I offer through my content consultancy is content marketing for the European market, the German market also, from a North American. So if you're going for a globalized English strategy or a North American strategy, I'm your girl.
Niels Brabandt
These are the perfect final words. So you see, marketing is crucial in today's times, but doing it sustainably is even more crucial. So Megan Thudiam is the person you need to talk to. At the end of this podcast, there's only one thing left for me to say. Megan, thank you very much for your time.
Megan Thudium
Thank you.