Building a constellation of influence beyond a single campaign

The Constellation Approach

At Fifty Thousand Feet, we think about audience relationships as spheres of influence. Our goal is to help clients create multiple pathways for people to discover and connect with their brands over time. We use a framework we call Constellation of Content.

A Constellation of Content is an audience approach that radiates a core narrative across different platforms and formats. Just as each player profile or video in our high school football coverage contributed to the larger narrative in our community, this method recognizes that each touchpoint serves as a valuable relationship on its own, rather than just a funnel to drive traffic elsewhere.

We created this framework during our team's time at The Atlantic, where we witnessed how truly influential stories create ripple effects far beyond their original publication. Consider the magazine’s iconic cover stories—deep investigations that permeate cultural consciousness. Most might never read the full 15,000-word piece, yet they absorb the central thesis through Instagram posts, podcast interviews with authors, and subsequent commentary.

The cover story doesn't exist as a single artifact; it becomes a constellation of influence that meets audiences wherever they naturally consume content.

This insight sparked a realization: The most impactful brands don't just create content and campaigns, they build ecosystems that allow ideas to flow across multiple channels and platforms.

Take National Geographic's Instagram strategy. Millions engage with their visual storytelling who may never visit nationalgeographic.com, and that's perfectly fine. These followers still build meaningful relationships with the brand, absorbing its values and perspective through a platform they actually use. The influence is real, even if it never converts to website traffic.

Where Traditional Methods Fall Short—And How We Help

When it comes to launching a new brand or product, the press release remains the default tool, despite its obvious limitations. Even the most compelling announcement competes for increasingly scarce attention. Your meticulously crafted story becomes just another pitch in an overcrowded space.

Similarly, brands obsess over driving traffic to their websites, treating every other touchpoint as a funnel toward a single destination. This thinking is fundamentally flawed. Your website is just one node in a larger ecosystem—and often not the most engaging one.

Our approach is versatile enough to address both challenges. It recognizes that brands can use the constellation strategy to fit multiple needs.

For some clients, we develop launch-specific constellations around a distinct moment—a brand refresh, product introduction, or major announcement. These focused ecosystems help brands maximize the impact of significant investments by creating multiple pathways for discovery and engagement during critical periods.

For others, we build sustaining constellations that become ongoing content operations. These longer-term strategies establish brands as essential voices in their industries, creating consistent value for audiences over months and years. Whether it's a flagship publication, thought leadership platform, or comprehensive editorial strategy, we help brands move from sporadic campaign thinking to sustained relationship-building.

Both approaches start with identifying your core narrative—the central idea that becomes the “sun” around which all content orbits. From there, we map priority channels, develop tailored messaging for each platform, and create the strategic foundation that allows your story to reach audiences wherever they naturally consume content.

Salesforce exemplifies this strategy at scale. While the brand was well-known as a leading customer relationship platform, their product-focused marketing left business leaders unclear about their full strategic value. They asked us to help them develop a core narrative that would help them build deeper affinity with global business leaders.

Rather than just developing a campaign around being a "strategic business partner," we helped them craft an entire ecosystem to demonstrate this positioning: a sophisticated magazine for executives, comprehensive training programs for internal teams, and master narratives that sales managers could adapt for specific contexts. Each touchpoint reinforced the same core story while serving distinct audience needs.

The result: deeper loyalty with global professional audiences who now see Salesforce as an essential business resource, not just a software vendor.

Measuring What Actually Matters

Traditional campaign metrics—clicks, impressions, website visits—miss the deeper value of constellation thinking. Real success lies in building brand equity and sustained relationships, not momentary attention spikes.

In our eight-year collaboration with Marsh McLennan, we launched a constellation around their core promise—managing global risk. The result was Brink, a publishing platform that grew to serve 2.5 million readers and over 100,000 executive subscribers. Brink’s value wasn't measured in website conversions but in how it positioned Marsh McLennan as the definitive voice on global risk—leading to speaking opportunities, partnership discussions, and enhanced credibility with target clients.

Each constellation touchpoint should align with specific business objectives: audience growth, trust building, lead generation, or talent recruitment. The key is recognizing that influence compounds over time through sustained presence, not campaign bursts.

Your brand investment deserves better than a launch-and-hope strategy. The most successful brands understand that launch day isn't the finish line—it's mile one of a relationship-building marathon.

The question isn't whether your audience will find you, but whether you're showing up where they already are, providing genuine value that makes them want to return. In a world where attention is the ultimate currency, constellations help you earn it rather than demand it.