Every brand can benefit from a robust and thoughtful content strategy, but creating said strategy isn’t easy. That’s where Vancouver-based content agency Quietly comes in. With clients running the gamut from DoorDash and Pinterest to Slack and Sotheby’s, Quietly has proven that its highly tactical, informed, and business-oriented services work across industries—whether your company wants to start a blog or is unsure how to engage on social media.

Below, chief operating officer Mike Ciebin shares a bit of his own journey, Quietly’s content ethos, and why Pavilion’s new Beatty location was the right place for them to settle into.

What was your journey to Quietly like?

My background is in digital marketing and digital media. I went to Vancouver Film School back in 1998, and I happened to be in a class with Dario Meli. After school, we went off on different paths but remained good friends. He went on to start a company called Invoke, which informed Hootsuite. I left film school and went to a company called Blast Radius, which was a digital marketing company; I was probably the third employee at the time when I joined them, and I was with them for 17 years. Through my tenure at Blast Radius, I worked on many different types of projects and accounts, but at a certain point, a couple of my colleagues and I started a sub-agency within it called Academy, which was a content agency. When Blast Radius was sold to a conglomerate called WPP, I took a year sabbatical and started talking with Dario about Quietly.

Dario and Sean Tyson, our current CEO, founded Quietly, which focused on technology for publishers and brands to create really compelling brand stories, articles, and lists—that was the product and the company at the time. And then about a year in, the company pivoted based on the needs from some of their clients, who asked if Quietly could produce the content for them as well. And that’s when I joined, with my background in building and running content agencies, back in 2014 or 2015, and am now a partner as well as chief operating officer.

You’ve been there almost since the beginning. Looking back on Quietly over the years, how has the company continued to change or innovate based on market needs?

I would say our foundation hasn’t changed from its core, which is really about creating really compelling content that provides business results. That’s always been something that we strove to do: we can create excellent content and creative, but it has to be rooted in excellent strategy—consultative-level strategy, business strategy—and it has to show ROI or have a path to ROI. That has been our core tenet since the beginning and still is, regardless of who our client is and what technology is in the marketplace.

But we do pivot. We were one of the early adopters that had OpenAI API access into some of their natural language models, and we experimented with a lot of data that we had access to in order to help make some of these insights in terms of what content should be created and where it should be published. All three of us—Dario, Sean, and myself—are always very-tech forward, so it’s always figuring out how we can leverage it to create a better result for our clients.

What are some of the ways Quietly creates content with a path to ROI?

It’s always strategy first. Content, of course, is a pretty broad term, as people have different understandings of it, and they all can be correct. But we have to start with a very robust strategy, and we have to understand how that aligns with the overall business strategy. Then we figure out what it is that needs to be produced. Content can be anything from a thought leadership article by an executive to an instructional video for an end user, and everything in between. So based on the strategy, we figure out what needs to be produced, where it needs to go, and if we’re doing performance marketing, what is the plan for that? And then it’s assigning ROI or attribution models to the content with the client, and then measuring from there.

What drew you to Pavilion’s Beatty location, and why was that the right fit for where your company is at right now?

While we’re still very much headquartered in Vancouver, almost 50 per cent of our team now is outside of BC, and that changed our needs for office space. We went fully remote for a while, but we did still want an office space for the team members who do like to work out of an office setting, either regularly or periodically, so the search began.

We looked at a bunch of spaces that offer coworking services, and we landed on Pavilion. I would say the environment at Pavilion is what really drew us there: it’s a very calm, very professional, mature setting. We had looked at the other typical coworking spaces that are in the city, but we liked that Pavilion Beatty was new, and liked the environment in terms of the lighting and the other companies that are there in the space. All the people that we interacted with were all very accommodating and friendly. Instead of a more open, hot-desk situation, we wanted a private space to call our own, and they had just the right size.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.