Big expectations. Two weeks in, the floor dropped out.
I joined Central Garden & Pet to lead Digital Marketing for the Garden division with high hopes. The business leaders were classically trained CPG marketers — people who understood brand, had big ambitions for digital transformation, and had the budgets to match.
Two weeks in, the division's C-suite leadership got axed.
Overnight, I went from a multimillion-dollar budget to bare-bones "keep the lights on" marketing. Same thing for every one of my peers. The ambitions were still there. The money wasn't.
The first call I made was to our agency. I needed to understand what was still possible at our new budget level. Their answer: 10 pieces of content. Total. For the year. For two very different brands — Pennington and Amdro — each with distinct audiences, tone, and seasonal content needs.
That wasn't a content strategy. That was rationing.
In 2013, there was a new kind of platform that nobody in CPG was using yet.
Enter Contently. The platform connected brands directly with vetted freelance content creators, cutting out the agency intermediary entirely. This isn't a novel concept now — creator marketplaces are everywhere. But in 2013, it was genuinely revolutionary, especially in CPG.
My proposal: take the money earmarked for the agency and spend it on Contently instead. Same budget, completely different model.
My colleagues were skeptical. Fair enough — we'd never run content this way before, the brand voice controls weren't clear, and we had no proof it would work at the quality level we needed.
So I gave the initiative a name designed to make the goal impossible to ignore. We called it 100 Pieces of Awesome.
The platform was the easy part. Building how we'd work inside it was a different story entirely.
The technical setup of Contently was straightforward. What wasn't straightforward: building the processes, training the team, and codifying brand positioning and voice inside the platform so that freelance writers could actually produce content that felt like Pennington and Amdro — not like generic garden content from the internet.
That work took months. Four of them, to be exact, with not a single piece of content to show for it.
By month four, people had started saying "100 Pieces of Awesome" the way you say "Parenting is awesome" when your kid throws a tantrum on a cross-country flight. Technically accurate. Deeply ironic.
I started to wonder if the BHAG had been too ambitious.
Then it started to work. Really work.
We found a writer who was exceptional. She produced detailed how-to articles — the kind of practical, expert content that gardeners and homeowners were genuinely searching for. Her tone was exactly right. We all agreed immediately that it was a meaningful improvement over what the agency had been producing, not a compromise.
Those first five pieces became twenty-five. Twenty-five became the moment someone said, only half-joking: "Holy cannoli, we might actually hit 100 if we keep this up."
We hit our stride. The content production line was running. At year end, we counted our final tally.
"Holy cannoli! We might actually hit 100 pieces if we keep this up!"
102 pieces. Same budget. 30% better engagement. And content that still performs a decade later.
We ended the year with 102 pieces of content — produced for the same amount we were originally going to spend with an agency for 10. That content drove a 30% increase in engagement rate over the prior year.
More importantly, it kept paying off. Some of those "100 Pieces of Awesome" remained high performers for the Pennington and Amdro brands for years — in some cases, a decade later. Evergreen how-to content that real people were still finding, still reading, still acting on.
It wasn't content marketing mecca. It was something better: a permanent change in how we worked.
Not every piece of content was the perfect realization of the brand vision. Not everyone loved the new model — some stakeholders missed the creative control and strategic guidance that came with a full-service agency relationship. Contently didn't replace everything the agency did, so we had to fill gaps along the way.
But this experience made all of us better marketers. It forced us to codify our brand voices in ways we'd never had to before. It widened the aperture of who could create content on behalf of our brands. It made us think differently about creativity, accessibility, and flexibility.
Our budget cuts — involuntary, disorienting, unwelcome — turned us into early adopters of a model for content creation that's now completely mainstream. Creator marketplaces, freelance-first content strategies, platform-based editorial workflows: none of that was normal in 2013. We were doing it because we had no other choice.
Now that "new approach" is the norm.
Sometimes a crazy BHAG really does become a success story. Even if it takes four months of people saying it ironically to get there.