The whole “who we are” thing is so much less important than “what we can do for you” thing, but at the end of the day, people work with people, so we’d like you to know a little more about us. Maybe we can get to know a little more about you, too.

• Nutlug: The story behind the name

The story, of course, is banal to many, inspirational to a few, and fact for us.

My wife, my father and mother, and I were all seated around the dining room table, a few cups into a competitive game of Scrabble. Calling the game competitive is redundant – we kept past scoresheets in the slightly battered box from games more than a dozen years ago, just to prove prowess.

I’ve been known to carefully consider my plays (known by my spouse as me taking “for-EVER”) – and finally the word ‘nutlug’ finds its way from my tile bench to the board. The score was added, the game went on. A narrow defeat later, I am charged with putting the game away and clearing the table of beer bottles. Marveling at the spread of the effort (all four corners’ triples used easily), I note ‘nutlug’ again. It now occurs to me I had meant to play ‘lugnut,’ but the funny thing is all three ultra-competitive players also assumed it was correct. In truth, it was just another way of looking at it.

That’s where Nutlug comes in – as a different way to look at marketing. It may be created from the same thing – integrated marketing communications – but it’s flip-flopped: consumers now tell marketers what to do, content is created and then channels are decided, smart companies give away knowledge freely and then hope to monetize sometime later, and so forth.

A different way to look at it.

• Content Keith

Keith Wiegold is an experienced strategist, business development rainmaker, speaker, educator, and evangelist for Content Marketing.

A smorgasbord of a background combined of various marketing disciplines has led to what now seems a natural recipe for content marketing:

• 1 (one) part major ad agencies (Leo Burnett and Publicis – nee Bloom) with a sprinkling of creative and media, followed by a heavy dose of strategic account management
• 1 (one) part traditional publishers (American Media then Meredith) with a dash of custom publishing efforts at Better Homes and Gardens
• 1 (one) part custom publishing with a fine focus on CPGs
• 3 (three) parts content marketing, with global leaders Redwood and Haymarket, whisked together with a changing customer environment and dynamic advances in media technologies
• Served with a position as Adjunct Professor teaching graduate-level students at Northwestern University’s Medill School – Integrated Marketing Communications about content as marketing and as a business.
• Mixed well. Engage!