Campaign · Building Out Loud
Building in Public Does Not Mean Publishing Everything.
There is a difference between building in public and allowing everything you make to become public.
If you are reading this here on OutloudMarketer, you are seeing the result of a lesson I learned the messy way.
I was excited about what I was creating, and my natural instinct was to share it. So I posted pieces of the work on my personal Facebook profile for friends to see.
The problem was that I had the whole story in my head and they did not.
I knew which character belonged to which property. I knew which image was an experiment, which idea was half-finished, which post represented a real decision, and which thing I had shared simply because I was delighted that I had managed to make it.
My friends received a parade of names, faces, projects, and partial explanations. Some of it confused them. Some of it should never have been public-facing in the first place.
A handful of finished posts.
That is one reason this article exists here now. OutloudMarketer needs to tell the story in a way another human being can actually follow—not merely display whatever the production process happened to spit out that day.
The work behind the visible work.
Someone could look at the Instagram account and see a handful of posts. I see the research, source checking, writing, revisions, graphics, narration, video editing, scheduling, account setup, platform problems, false starts, and hours spent deciding what the brand was supposed to sound like.
Consistency is part of the work.
The face has to remain the same woman.
Even creating Kate was not a matter of choosing a pretty avatar and moving on. It took several revisions to arrive at a face and outfit we could lock. Kate cannot appear to be a different woman every time she shows up for work, and neither of us was going to tolerate a public wardrobe with no standards.
The difficult part was turning Kate into my voice and presence without making her feel like a costume, a replacement for me, or a generic AI spokesperson reading marketing copy that could belong to anybody. Kate has to carry my judgment, my humor, my standards, and the way I actually see the work. If she says something I would never say, the perfect face does not save it.
The brands have to stay in their own rooms.
We also had trouble keeping different brands and characters in their own rooms. From inside the work, we knew there were separate ideas and identities. That did not prevent names, images, and context from crossing when material was being created.
The public does not care that the distinction existed in our heads or in a planning file. The public judges the thing that appeared in front of them.
That is branding. Not just the logo. Not just the colors. Branding is whether the name, face, voice, message, destination, and experience all appear to belong together.
Every channel needs a job and a route home.
OutloudMarketer was never meant to be trapped inside one social feed. Each channel can carry the part of the story it is built to carry.
All of those routes should lead somewhere that makes sense. Another platform is another place where the story can lose its name tag. Publishing more does not automatically make the brand bigger. Without a clear relationship to the work here and a path back, it creates one more disconnected object on the internet.
The four labels that protect the reader.
Existence, approval, evidence, and recommendation are not interchangeable states.
That does not mean I am going to hide the mistakes now. The mistakes are some of the best material we have. It means I am going to edit them before I publish them, give them context, and make sure the right name, face, and voice are attached.
You deserve the truth about what it took to build this. You do not need every unfinished file dumped at your feet to prove I am being honest.
Building out loud should mean telling the truth about the work. It should not mean publishing everything with a file name.
Behind the work
Jacqueline & Kate
Jacqueline did the work and formed the point of view. Kate helps make it visible.
OutloudMarketer documents the decisions, experiments, failures, and useful conclusions behind what Black Cat Media is building.
No Lies. No Stealing.