When creation is cheap, judgment is expensive
Ten lessons from Allen Plummer, Global Head of Content at Carlyle, on content marketing in the private markets.
Allen joined Carlyle at the start of 2023 after more than 16 years at Vanguard, where he rose from marketing manager to leading a team of 50+ content, creative and communications professionals.
Across his career he has built social channels from scratch and run newsletters, podcasts, executive communications and digital experiences. The common thread: making financial services content sound like it was written by an actual human being. Here is what he shared with PEM members.
Think like a media company
Great media companies understand that attention is scarce, and that your competition includes your peers plus everything else fighting for your audience's time.
The second lesson from media is structure. Bloomberg and CNN build frameworks that let people, themes and topics plug in whenever the news demands. Allen runs Carlyle's content the same way, so the team can pivot with the business while still delivering consistency week after week.
Do two or three things well
In private markets it is tempting to benchmark yourself against the 800-pound gorillas. Allen would rather do two or three things well than ten things averagely: it is better for the brand, for the team and for morale.
For smaller teams his advice is clear. Keep strategy, vision and oversight in-house, and use your budget to outsource execution.
You can always buy execution, especially with AI, but you can never outsource strategy.
Progress, not perfection
Allen treats his content portfolio as a live experiment: refine what works, pause what doesn't, and see whether anyone notices it has gone. Every choice ladders up to the business goals, the CMO's marketing strategy and the firm's direction.
Choose faces with care, and build bench strength
The right approach depends on the firm and the person. At Carlyle he favours bench strength over a single face, working with the global head of PR on a simple test: whoever performs well in earned media will perform well in owned media.
Some series have a host and some don't. Admiral James Stavridis became the face of Carlyle's leadership series after a first meeting that turned into 75 minutes on favourite writers; he was already writing books and op-eds and commenting on CNN, an untapped resource hiding in plain sight. Start with the expert or the format? Roughly fifty-fifty, says Allen.
Relationships beat editorial boards
Asked by a member whether Carlyle uses an editorial board, Allen said no. In his experience boards are good at generating ideas and poor at steering, and they cost a lot of time managing personalities and competing agendas.
Instead, he relies on a transparent operating rhythm and one-to-one relationships:
- A note every Friday on what is coming next week
- A shared content calendar
- Quarterly sessions with business heads on the quarter ahead
- Monthly meetings with the global heads of legal and compliance
Hands-on editorial work is only 25-30% of his job. The rest is relationship management, and that is what lets him build consensus and push back when needed.
Put the mess in creation and the discipline in distribution
“Creativity is messy.”
Allen Plummer
And that is fine. What should not be messy is distribution. Build social, email and web into a well-oiled machine with repetition and templates, so nobody reinvents the wheel each time.
Then give the team defined places to play: designers own the visual sandbox, writers own the hooks, leads and pull quotes. Structure everywhere else frees up their brain power for the creative part.
Own your audience, but show up where people are
Owning a distribution list still matters, especially as private markets push into wealth. But people rarely visit a GP's website to consume content; when they do, they come for a specific reason.
Allen runs a hub-and-spoke model. The website is the hub, while LinkedIn (the main stage in this industry) and YouTube (essential for video) carry native content to where people already are. Getting attention depends equally on distribution, visual identity and the storytelling in your hook.
Spend 30% on big rocks, 70% on repurposing
Allen's energy goes into the 30%: the "big rocks" such as a long-form video, a white paper or an outlook. His team focuses on the 70%: breaking each one into LinkedIn posts, short clips, carousels and other snackable pieces with a shelf life of weeks.
The logic is simple. Make it easy for the 90% who will never read the white paper to still get the gist, while the 10% who want depth can download it. A handful of bullets in a LinkedIn post can deliver the executive summary to far more people than the PDF ever will.
Events are one of the most underused content sources
Firms tend to either bring in a five-person crew for slick, polished video or settle for a generic sizzle reel. Allen keeps an iPhone rig and mics in his desk drawer; raw behind-the-scenes footage, such as from Carlyle's Davos delegation, consistently outperforms high production value. The high-gloss treatment is saved for flagship moments.
He also reviews every event agenda in advance and treats each session as potential content: a panel with portfolio companies becomes a Q&A, an MD interviewing a CEO becomes a case study. And he uses events as tentpole moments, aligning content with places where executives and salespeople are already showing up so marketing rides existing momentum.
When creation is cheap, judgment is expensive
AI makes it easy for anyone to produce content, so the scarce skill becomes judgment and taste. AI gives back what you give it: clear direction and rich context produce better output, and holding it accountable improves it further.
Allen never passes anything AI-generated on without multiple sets of human eyes.
How to measure it
Attribution is hard with long sales cycles. Allen combines qualitative signals (relationship managers and executives telling him a piece came up in a meeting or helped move a deal) with tagged analytics across web, email and social, filtered by author, business line, theme and sub-theme in a Power BI dashboard.
He also watches brand effects. Carlyle recently saw one of its largest-ever jumps in a brand reputation survey, on the heels of new brand work, a new website and its content programme. And when debates arise, he reaches for data:
“You can't debate analytics.”
Allen Plummer