Are you a reporter or an adventurer? Most agents never actually decide, and it’s costing them their content.

Are you a reporter or an adventurer?

It sounds like something you’d find at the back of a magazine next to a quiz about which sandwich you are. It is, according to Andrew Fogliato, one of the more important decisions a content creator can make, and almost never actually makes on purpose.

The distinction is simple. The adventurer goes and does the thing, then comes back and tells you what it was like. The reporter finds the person who already does the thing and asks them about it instead. Same subject matter. Completely different show.

“You’re either the reporter, so you’re going to go find out all the information that completes this guide and adds more depth to it,” Fogliato said, “or you’re the adventurer, you’re going to go out and experience all these things and then come back and tell everyone what you got up to.”

Taylor Hack, mid-build on a content strategy around Edmonton’s River Valley, was working through the question live when it became clear that most agents skip it entirely. They just make whatever feels doable that week. Sometimes that’s a quick interview. Sometimes it’s a personal story. There’s no lane, so there’s no consistency, and the content ends up feeling like whatever was easiest at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, because that’s exactly what it is.

Why the wrong choice sinks the whole thing

The stakes of getting this backwards are higher than they sound.

Fogliato described watching a content series attempt the adventurer model at scale: a team flying out to interview people in person, spending full days shadowing them, building genuinely great documentary-style episodes. It worked. It was also completely unsustainable, and within a handful of episodes, the format quietly downgraded to a straightforward sit-down conversation because nobody could keep flying around the world to do it justice.

“You have to think about it from a logistical point of view,” he said. “Can I consistently find the time to do things and experience those things and then come back and share about them?”

His own answer, for what it’s worth, is reporter, and for a practical reason: it’s a lot easier to get someone on a video call for forty minutes than it is to fly somewhere and follow them around for a day. That’s not a compromise. It’s just knowing which format you can actually sustain past episode six.

Hack landed on reporter, too, though with a twist. His preferred version is closer to an on-scene correspondent: present for the experience, somewhat inside it, occasionally getting talked into doing the thing himself. Less full adventurer, more the reporter who ends up rafting anyway because the story needed it.

Neither is objectively better. The point is that guessing wrong, or never picking at all, is what quietly kills most content plans before they get anywhere close to interesting.

The pillar that starts shallow on purpose

Once the format question is settled, the conversation moved to what the first big piece of content should actually look like, and the advice ran against instinct.

Fogliato’s suggestion for Hack’s River Valley project: start with something that covers everything at a surface level rather than trying to go deep on day one. Picture a first draft that reads like a Google Doc, eventually becomes a PDF, and eventually spins into fifty other pieces of content. The first pass is deliberately inch deep and mile wide.

“A lot of people just go on Claude and be like, bring me the complete guide to River Valley living,” he said. “It’ll pop out something that’s halfway decent. But then you start adding your own personal experience, your own anecdotes, your own depth to it, and that’s what takes it from decent content to way better.”

The deeper strategy is what happens after. Each shallow section becomes its own future post. Update the pricing numbers when they change. Update the condo bylaw section the moment a building changes its pet policy. Refresh instead of replace, on whatever schedule each piece actually needs, whether that’s monthly, annually, or basically never.

Fogliato’s own bar for whether it’s working: revisit anything a year old and feel a small flash of embarrassment about how good you thought it was at the time. If you don’t feel that, you’ve stopped improving.

Ask a 1950s shoe factory floor manager

Fogliato’s method for generating better ideas: take a concept, then ask an AI model to react to it as ten wildly different personas, the weirder the better. His favourite example, offered with a completely straight face, was asking a model to respond as the floor manager at a 1950s shoe factory.

“It’s such different points of view, it forces it to come out with angles you wouldn’t have thought of before,” he said. “The more ridiculous your examples can be, the better.”

There’s a more practical version of the same trick underneath the joke. Fogliato referenced research suggesting that when an AI model is given a genuinely specific demographic profile and asked to answer as that person, its responses land close to 90 percent accuracy against real survey data, provided the description is precise enough. Vague personas get vague, unhelpful answers. A tightly drawn one, down to household composition, schools, and target neighbourhood, produces something close to a real focus group.

The floor manager bit is the fun version. The precise persona simulation is the version that actually improves the content.

Deal of the week is a feature. Know what the benefit is.

The back half of the episode dealt with something Hack flagged as chronically underthought across the industry: the actual offer sitting behind a content strategy, and the difference between a feature and the benefit it delivers.

Deal of the week came up as the clean example. The feature is simple: a curated listing, sent out regularly. The benefit is something else entirely, an expert’s judgment applied to the market on the reader’s behalf, delivered as a habit they can count on.

“It could be as little as a link to explore it on their own,” Hack said. “It could also be that you send a video of you reviewing the listing and talking about what you see.”

The harder question, which Fogliato pressed on directly, is where along the funnel the resulting offer should actually sit. Send a broad audience five hundred leads a month and some teams will happily sort through them with automation and a disciplined follow-up cadence. Send another team just five qualified, ready-to-move prospects and that’s the version they can actually work. Neither is wrong. Picking without knowing which one your systems can absorb is how good content ends up generating leads nobody follows up with.

The full episode covers how to gate a pillar guide without losing the reader, how case studies and buyer want-lists sit at different points in the funnel, and the early legwork on pulling MLS data directly into an AI-built custom site.

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