Content Amplified

Everyone in marketing has been told to do more with AI, but almost nobody is asking what that volume actually costs. In this episode of Content Amplified, Karen Cooper, Director of Marketing for the content experience team at Wolters Kluwer Health, shares what she is learning from the LinkedIn polls she is running ahead of her talk at B2B Ignite. The results surprised her: when teams are pushed to move faster, the first thing sacrificed is not creative quality, it is clarity on priorities. And the biggest threat to A plus work is not a lack of creative time, it is last minute requests. Karen explains why the do-more era is creating what one Superside report calls a new kind of burnout, a human problem rather than a technology problem, how to keep creative people from becoming order takers, and why leaders have to push back when volume stops moving the needle. If you lead a creative team in the AI era, this conversation puts words to the strain you are feeling, and offers a way through it.

About Karen

Karen Cooper is the Director of Marketing for the content experience team at Wolters Kluwer Health, where she has spent the last four years growing the marketing function within the health organization. She leads a shared-services team of designers, motion graphic artists, writers, social media creators, and project managers who sit in the middle of product, program, and campaign work. A past speaker at B2B Ignite North America, she is returning to the conference to talk about what the do-more-with-less era is doing to the people behind the marketing discipline. Karen believes AI should be an enablement for creative work, not the end result.

Show Notes

• Connect with Karen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kcnarrative/
• Vote in Karen's LinkedIn polls on creative teams and AI

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The most expensive thing you can make in marketing is an assumption. In this episode of Content Amplified, Vanessa Mbonu, Vice President of Marketing at the NAACP, explains what changes when a team stops treating content as output (checking the box on this week's blog post, flyer, or TikTok) and starts treating it as infrastructure: a strategic system the whole organization feeds, from programming to policy to operations. Vanessa shares the leadership moment that sparked the shift ("we focus a lot on output and not enough on outcome"), why audience-first means meeting supporters where they already are (they care about voting rights, and they also watch Love Island and March Madness), and her rule for AI: start with AI or end with AI, but never AI from start to finish. She closes with a tactical playbook: run a skills assessment, use the start-stop-continue framework, automate what a human doesn't need to do, and pick a brand mentor outside your category, whether that's Nike, Beyonce, or Labubu. If your content program feels like throwing things at the wall, this conversation shows you the smarter way.

About Vanessa

Vanessa Mbonu is the Vice President of Marketing at the NAACP, the nation's first and largest civil rights organization, and a marketing subject matter expert focused on social impact, civil rights, and social justice. She has worked in and around the nonprofit industry for over 15 years. She also runs her own consultancy, where she helps small businesses, particularly small Black-owned businesses, build content, marketing, and communication strategies that actually drive impact. A self-described yapper who is chronically online, she believes marketers should figure out how AI can make their work better, not how they can make AI better.

Show Notes

• Connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessambonu/

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Anything you say in a sales call either adds or detracts. It's signal or noise, and buyers don't want noise. 

In this episode of Content to Close, Tim Schwedes, who leads enablement and training for sales engineers at Egnyte, explains how to use content to build a simple mental model in a prospect's head. He hates slides used as a crutch and prefers a few bullets or a single diagram that anchors the conversation without taking it over, because a sales conversation is a "knife fight" up close while marketing is the "air cover" that has to resonate with everyone. He walks through Egnyte's internal "jawbreaker slide" on content graphs (a content layer, a user-behavior layer, and a domain layer, like the terms dictionary that finally gets AI to spell Egnyte right), why "does this address that requirement you talked about" beats "does that make sense," how the same simple diagram gets tailored for construction versus financial services versus life sciences, and why "steal, steal, steal" is the fastest way to improve, even from competitors. If your content keeps getting more complicated, this episode shows you how to pare it back down.

About Tim

Tim Schwedes leads enablement and training for all sales engineers at Egnyte, the cloud content platform. His career started with a chance seat next to a consultant on a train in college, which turned into an internship and then years spent implementing old-school enterprise document management systems on projects that could run for years. About six years ago, he joined Egnyte as a sales engineer, moved into managing the SE team, and now trains every sales engineer at the company. His core philosophy: hunt pain, map the solution to it or disqualify honestly, and keep every sales conversation a conversation, not a pitch.

Show Notes

• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timschwedes/

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Most companies are "sprinkling AI" onto old processes when the real wins come from throwing the process in the garbage and rebuilding it. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Paul Schmidt, VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, an elite HubSpot agency partner, maps the AI adoption bell curve he sees across the thousand-plus companies SmartBug has worked with: early adopters who figured it out on their own, a chunky middle leaning on embedded features like auto-written subject lines, and laggards in litigious industries like finance and healthcare. Paul shares the practical playbook for moving up the curve: 30-minute audits with department leaders to surface bottlenecks and mundane processes, process mapping as the prerequisite for real AI maturity ("you're going to need a process for mapping processes"), and building agents early just to learn what they can and cannot do. He also explains how his roughly 200-person org went from nobody sharing AI use cases, out of fear of getting in trouble, to about five shared in Slack every day. If you want a clear picture of where your team sits on the AI curve and the next step to take, this episode is your map.

About Paul

Paul Schmidt is the VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, one of the few elite HubSpot agency partners in the world. In his role he oversees AI fluency and adoption for the SmartBug team, builds internal agents and tools that streamline the agency's processes, and develops new AI service offerings for clients. He has spent more than a decade in consulting, working directly with clients on CRM onboarding, growing their marketing teams, and building pipeline through marketing campaigns. If it touches the HubSpot ecosystem, Paul is your go-to guy.

Show Notes

• Connect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drumming/
• Paul's website: paulschmidt.com

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If AI falls short in your writing, Clint Horvath says the problem is you: ChatGPT is a mirror, and it can only reflect a story you already know A to Z. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Clint, a post-production veteran turned screenwriter with three films on Amazon Prime, breaks down how he uses AI as a tool within storytelling rather than a replacement. He explains how he fed roughly 50 of his own screenplays into AI so it learned his writing patterns, why he deliberately switches genres mid-story (turning a sci-fi into horror in act three) to push the AI past its predictable path, and the deadline story that proves the method: laid off and racing the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Festival, he wrote the script with AI as a co-pilot through seven revisions, finished January 28, and was selected February 3. He also shares why he goes into every AI conversation objectively so it stays neutral, and how the approach carried him through writing one screenplay a month in 2025. If you want AI to amplify your creativity instead of flattening it, this conversation shows you how.

About Clint

Clint Horvath is a post-production veteran specializing in graphic design and visual effects, with a career spanning local news, the Miami Heat, the Florida Panthers, and Fox Sports, where he covered Florida's home teams across hockey, baseball, and basketball. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Full Sail University and has studied story structure deeply, from Blake Snyder's beat sheet to Syd Field. Outside his day job on creative, marketing, and branding teams, he writes and directs films: he has three films on Amazon Prime and more than 50 scripts. He also writes books under the pen name Rich Von Halt, an anagram of his name.

Show Notes

• Connect with Clint on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clinthorvath/
• Clint's website: clinthorvath.com

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In B2B, people buy from people, even when it's a corporation selling through a corporation to another corporation. In this episode of Content Amplified, Richard Hutton, Associate Vice President of Demand Generation at Sharp, explains how his team shifted from slick, highly produced product content to human-led stories, and why engagement went up when they did. Richard shares the standout example: instead of the usual flying-through-a-galaxy corporate video at the NSCA business leadership conference, his team asked sellers across the country to film one-minute clips on their phones, stitched them together, and watched the room light up recognizing familiar faces. He also takes on the "marketing's not my job" objection with a simple reframe (everyone is in sales), makes the case for case studies built around human outcomes instead of specs, explains why 20 great conversations at a regional event beat 3,000 badge scans at a big trade show, and shares his brand-guardrail philosophy: skip the 16 pages of rules and just tell people to make good choices. If you want your whole team creating content that actually sounds like them, this episode shows you how.

About Richard

Richard Hutton is the Associate Vice President of Demand Generation at Sharp, where he leads a channel-oriented team marketing both through partners and to end clients in the audio visual industry. He joined NEC Display Solutions ten years ago and moved to Sharp when it purchased NEC through a joint venture, and before that he spent years running channel marketing at Samsung. His path into marketing was anything but typical: he started out as a psychiatric nurse and music promoter before landing in IT distribution, where he worked through purchasing, sales, and marketing roles. He still loves music.

Show Notes

• Connect with Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-hutton-1407915/

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Most enablement teams can tell you how many people sat through a course, but not whether any of it moved the business. 

In this special Content to Close episode, Erika Robertson, Director of Enablement at Citrix, walks through how she proves enablement is worth the budget by starting with the end in mind. Erika is certified through the ROI Institute and uses the Phillips ROI methodology from Jack and Patty Phillips, which she contrasts with the Kirkpatrick model most L&D and enablement teams default to. She explains how she builds the measurement plan before any content exists, so she can go back to stakeholders and say, this is how I will show you it worked. She covers identifying the metric category or bucket first, then finding a baseline like average deal size or sales cycle time for a group before a program runs, aligning instructional strategies to the business outcomes that matter, and her discipline that if something cannot be measured or will not move the business, it is probably not worth the investment. If you have ever struggled to connect your enablement work to real business results, this conversation gives you the framework.

About Erika

Erika Robertson is the Director of Enablement at Citrix, where she supports internal go-to-market teams, partners, and customers. She thought she would become a teacher coming out of college, then found her way into training adults instead, and has spent almost her entire career in enablement inside software companies including Cisco, SAP, and VMware. She holds a master's in instructional technology and is certified through the ROI Institute in the Phillips ROI methodology. She is passionate about enablement, go-to-market enablement, and instructional design, and about staying true to those principles even as AI changes the work.

Show Notes

• Connect with Erika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikajrobertson/
• ROI Institute (Phillips ROI methodology, founded by Jack and Patty Phillips)

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Buyers trust a peer who has been there over a brand on a soapbox. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Scott Hild, who leads brand and marketing at Propeller, a management consulting firm that helps companies through transformation, breaks down what he calls the visible expert strategy: telling the company's story from its people's point of view instead of from the brand. Scott explains how this differs from generic thought leadership. Rather than publishing "five things you need to know about X," his team tells the story of a real client conversation: what the client was thinking, how the conversation went, where they started, and where they ended up. He gets specific on the parts most teams skip: deciding the purpose of a piece before making it, using a StoryBrand-style rubric so the audience can see themselves as the hero, picking which internal experts to build programs around ("go with your hot hand," the people with genuine passion), and developing content abstracts across formats for the whole year. If you run marketing for a firm that sells expertise instead of a product, this conversation gives you a model you can act on.

About Scott

Scott Hild leads brand and marketing for Propeller, a management consulting firm that helps companies through transformation: business process, operating model, organizational design, and increasingly AI. Scott's team works on the change, people, and strategy side of AI, helping clients align their AI initiatives to their business goals rather than the technical side. He describes Propeller as a "credence business," one that sells its people and their expertise rather than a product, which is why he puts those experts front and center in the firm's content.

Show Notes

• Connect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotthild/
• StoryBrand by Donald Miller (referenced as a framework Scott's team uses)

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Your content team might be having its best quarter ever, and the dashboard will tell you nothing happened. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Tony Pataky, Director of SEO at Procore, explains why measuring your brand's visibility inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI is fundamentally noisy, and what to track instead. He walks through a SparkToro study from Rand Fishkin that ran roughly 3,000 prompt tests across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI with about 600 volunteers, and found that less than one in 100 times did ChatGPT return the same list of brands twice, and less than one in 1,000 times the exact same rankings. Tony explains why "rankings" do not really exist in LLMs, why building prompt sets from your high-converting SEO keywords misleads you, and why staying broad and high-level tells you more. He then lays out a three-layer measurement approach: AI visibility tracking, referral traffic, and post-conversion surveys, where some teams find AI was part of 30, 40, or 50 percent of buyer journeys even when LLM referral traffic reads under 1 percent. Listen for a practical way to build a measurement baseline now and reframe the attribution conversation with your CMO.

About Tony

Tony Pataky is the Director of SEO at Procore, where he leads the SEO team along with the marketing performance team covering analytics and CRO. He joined Procore through its acquisition of Levelset, where he worked before the acquisition. His career has been focused on SEO across enterprise companies, startups, and everything in between.

Show Notes

• Connect with Tony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonypataky/
• SparkToro study by Rand Fishkin on AI answer consistency (roughly 3,000 prompt tests across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI)

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For 25 years the game was rank on Google, but no one scrolls past the AI overview anymore. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Jeramy Gordon, VP of Marketing at a global background screening company and a 14-year marketer who started in newspaper journalism, breaks down the shift from SEO to GEO and AIO. Jeramy explains the move from fighting for position to fighting for inclusion: roughly 40% of queries are now answered inside AI overviews, organic traffic is dropping accordingly, and Adobe saw a 1200% jump in AI-driven traffic once engines started citing it. He gets specific on how to earn those citations: structure content around the questions people actually ask, write 3000-word definitive guides that go deep instead of broad, tighten your headers, title tags, and meta descriptions, and build off-site signals through press, podcasts, and third-party mentions that train the AI's model of who you are as an entity. He also makes the case for video and podcasts as proof of human-generated content. If you are trying to relearn the playbook for AI search, this conversation gives you a place to start.

About Jeramy

Jeramy Gordon is the VP of Marketing at Cisive, a global background screening company that runs pre-employment and post-employment background checks worldwide. He has spent 14 years in marketing, but before that he built an entire career in journalism, including 12 years in the newspaper industry. Jeramy is also a published author of two books, and he believes AI will not replace marketing, but it will replace marketers who do not embrace AI.

Show Notes

• Connect with Jeramy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeramygordon/
• The Power of 10, Jeramy's personal method for improving across faith, family, fitness, and finance in 10 intentional minutes a day
• Opinionated Not Judgmental, Jeramy's book on holding strong convictions without treating people who disagree differently

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