Don’t sell to your community. Just talk to them.

DadGang founder Bart Szaniewski started with $750, 100 hats and no real business plan. Four years later, the brand has sold more than a million hats and generated over $36 million in revenue.

He’s done it while ignoring a lot of conventional DTC advice: DadGang still uses Shopify’s free Dawn theme, shoots much of its content on an iPhone and runs a private Facebook group for its community. Bart’s philosophy is simple: don’t copy what works for someone else. Build around your customer.

On this episode of Marketing Trends with Stephanie Postles, Bart explains how DadGang keeps its marketing simple at scale, turns customer feedback into real products, and uses email, SMS and AI without overwhelming the people on the other end.

What you'll learn

Connect

DadGang Co.

Bart Szaniewski on LinkedIn

Marketing Trends

Chapters

0:00 From $750 and 100 Hats to DadGang

3:23 The Marketing Years Before DadGang

7:13 Why Fatherhood Content Felt Wrong

10:08 $36M Without Forcing Growth

12:40 Why DadGang Still Uses a Free Shopify Theme

15:34 The Martech Stack Is Shrinking

16:16 AI Replaced the Landing Page Process

17:32 Don't Build Around the Algorithm

19:38 "Where Is Your Community?"

21:04 Why 15,000 Dads Still Use Facebook

25:13 When Customers Design the Product

29:07 How Gary Vee Became a Partner

35:18 Email + SMS for a Million-Hat Brand

37:36 Letting AI Choose the Send Time

38:22 Why Non-Selling Emails Still Drive Revenue

41:29 What Comes After a Million Hats?

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do you get your brand into the 90% of memory that's subconscious?

In this segment from Marketing Trends, neuroscientist Pranav Yadav reveals that the human brain is a pattern-seeking storytelling device — and the formula for creating lasting brand memory hasn't changed in 5,000 years. From Vedic rituals to Alexander the Great's encounter with a naked wise man to MasterCard's Priceless campaign, Pranav traces the thread between ancient storytelling wisdom and modern brand architecture.

This episode was made possible by Attentive.

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Are you just busy working? Or are you adding value?

Marketing has become overloaded with channels, platforms, metrics, and specialized roles. But Seth Matlins believes the job itself is much simpler: create value, drive sustainable growth, and help the business create and keep customers.

In this episode, Seth joins Stephanie Postles to explain why CMO job descriptions are often fundamentally disconnected from business results—and why marketers must see themselves as commercial leaders, not merely brand leaders.

They discuss the danger of optimizing for departmental metrics instead of business outcomes, why short-term pressure can destroy long-term growth, and what Seth learned from one of the biggest strategic mistakes of his career. They also explore why brands must become more humane in an AI-driven world, what separates the world’s most influential CMOs, and why every decision a company makes either creates or destroys value.

Seth Matlins is the founder of The Wisdomist Company, former Managing Director of the Forbes CMO Network, and host of Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing.

Follow Seth: LinkedIn — Seth Matlins

Listen to his new show: Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing (Vox Media + The Wisdomist Company)

This episode brought to you by Attentive.

Attentive helps brands personalize messages across SMS, email, RCS, and push - so every interaction feels relevant, not random.

Not more marketing. Better marketing. 

That’s marketing made personal. That’s Attentive. 

To learn more visit attentive.com.

0:00 The CMO Job Description Is Broken

2:30 Marketing Is a Commercial Strategy

4:19 How “Marketing Prefixes” Broke the Function

8:04 Why Your Team Is Punching Growth in the Face

13:20 David Droga: Complexity Is a Tax on Success

16:02 The Worst Work Seth Ever Did

20:21 “You Neither Give Nor Take Direction”

24:03 Stop Trying to Be Human. Be Humane.

29:23 What Separates the World’s Most Influential CMOs

31:49 Why CEOs Struggle to Understand Marketing

34:03 Why Eric Schmidt Was Wrong About Marketing

35:43 Seth’s 10 Rules of Marketing

40:09 Introducing Create or Destroy

45:52 Lightning Round: Harry Potter, Coca-Cola and More

49:40 Are Your Metrics Making You Play the Wrong Game?

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A bank just issued the world's first loan to an AI agent. The agent applied, signed, and set its own repayment schedule. That's where marketing now lives — and most teams are still optimizing for the wrong layer. In this episode, Katja Forbes (founder of The CX Evolutionist and author of the field guide on machine customers) explains why AEO is a trap, why "the more discoverable you are, the more interchangeable you are," and what the actual moat looks like in agentic commerce. Fresh off a trip to Alibaba, BYD, and Unitree Robotics in China, Katja walks through the five types of machine customers already in market, why Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles is the B2C playbook, why Walmart's AI procurement is the B2B playbook, and the one mindset shift every marketing leader needs to make this quarter.

What you'll learn

• Why AEO and machine-readability are table stakes, not strategy

• The values-as-data play: how Patagonia and Walmart are already winning the agentic moat

• Why you can't greenwash an AI agent (and what to do if your supply chain receipts aren't flattering)

• The abundance-vs-efficiency mindset shift — and why stripping headcount for AI gains is corporate anorexia

Attentive helps brands personalize messages across SMS, email, RCS, and push - so every interaction feels relevant, not random.

Not more marketing. Better marketing. 

That’s marketing made personal. That’s Attentive. 

Connect
Katja Forbes on LinkedIn

The CX Evolutionist on Substack

Marketing Trends

Chapters

• 1:34 Inside Alibaba, BYD, and Unitree — what China is shipping today

• 4:09 How robots get their brains (and start transacting)

• 7:05 The 5 types of machine customers every marketer should know

• 10:37 Alibaba's 120-million-order onboarding campaign

• 13:33 Your car is reading your emotions — and about to buy on your behalf

• 16:31 What the US can actually learn from China's stack

• 23:12 "Marketing to robots is not a thing" — the AEO trap

• 27:36 A bank just gave the world's first loan to an AI agent

• 29:32 Why BJ Fogg's behavior model breaks for machine customers

• 37:17 The decision-paralysis problem and the rise of values-as-data

• 40:14 Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles: the brand moat playbook

• 45:39 Walmart's Pactum: B2B values-as-data is already live

• 54:51 Marketers need to start acting like scientists

• 56:53 Abundance, not efficiency — the corporate anorexia trap

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if everything you're optimizing for in marketing — attention, clicks, engagement — is a proxy for the one thing that actually drives action?

Pranav Yadav is the Founder & Global CEO of Neuro-Insight, the world's largest measure of memory. His company maps brains to determine what advertising actually does to people — second by second — with an 86% correlation to real-world sales. In this conversation, he makes the case that memory is the only metric that matters, explains why hyper-personalization is destroying culture, and breaks down exactly why Budweiser's most iconic Super Bowl ad failed at the brain level while Samsung's Wallhuggers became their most successful campaign ever.

Pranav Yadav is a former Goldman Sachs trader turned neuroscientist, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Ad Age 40 Under 40. He created the Neuro Impact Factor — the brain-based metric that all Australian out-of-home media is now traded on.

Key takeaways

• 90% of all memory is subconscious — brands have been measuring the wrong 10%

• $750 billion in annual marketing spend is wasted because recall ≠ memory

• The brain is a pattern-seeking storytelling device — personal relevance opens the door to memory

• Hyper-personalization destroys the shared cultural memory that makes marketing work

• The #1 rated Super Bowl ad (Budweiser Lost Puppy) placed the brand at the exact moment the brain stopped encoding memory

• Samsung's Wallhuggers hid the brand for 45 seconds and became their most successful campaign

Follow Pranav on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pranavyadavpy

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:31 The Urdu Couplet That Opens the Conversation

2:28 Marketing Has Been Leaning on Pseudoscience for Decades

5:09 Why Memory Is the Only Metric That Matters

8:32 The Shirt Test: Recall vs Memory

12:23 How to Get Into the 90% — Story Is the Boat

15:17 What 5,000-Year-Old Vedic Rituals Teach About Memory

19:41 Alexander the Great vs the Naked Wise Man

24:28 MasterCard's Priceless: Finding the Core Truth

27:29 Why Brands Don't Do This (It's Hard)

32:23 Brain Mapping: How Neuro-Insight Actually Measures Memory

39:26 Brand Architecture: The Formula Every Brand Needs

43:48 Why Hyper-Personalization Will Destroy Society

50:54 Why 90% of Super Bowl Ads Fail at the Brain Level

54:17 Budweiser's Lost Puppy: The #1 Ad That Failed

58:04 Samsung Wallhuggers: Genius at the Memory Moment

1:00:25 Why LLMs Are Trained on the Shadow of Thinking

1:07:41 Vows, Not Values: How Neuro-Insight Stays Creative

1:15:51 The Neuro Impact Factor: Changing How Australia Trades Media

1:19:57 What Makes a Great Billboard

1:20:23 Where to Find Pranav

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your blog will never earn an audience. Ever. That's not me — that's Melissa Rosenthal, who ran the SEO content engine at ClickUp, built media at BuzzFeed and Cheddar, and is now co-founder of Outlever building the playbook that replaces it.

In this episode, Melissa makes the case that the SEO blog era is collapsing in real time, that one strategic LinkedIn poster will out-perform 150 employees doing employee advocacy, and that while every other B2B operator is betting on AI, she's betting on humans — and using AI to do it. She's also dogfooding the entire thesis with her new publication, The State of Brand, which hit a million unique views in three weeks.

What you'll learn

• Why the SEO blog was a 'slot machine' — and what survives the AI search collapse

• The two-month consistency rule that separates real owned media from content theater

• Why one strategic LinkedIn poster beats 150 employees doing employee advocacy

• The one-to-one distribution playbook replacing mass organic traffic

• How Melissa's State of Brand publication converts at ~40% to demo on banner ads (yes, banner ads)

• Why product parity is now enough to beat 15-year incumbents — if your brand, service, and POV are sharper

Connect

Melissa Rosenthal on LinkedIn

The State of Brand

Outlever

Marketing Trends

Chapters

• 0:00   The SEO blog era is over

• 1:30   What's lighting Melissa up: State of Brand hits 1M views in 3 weeks

• 4:30   BuzzFeed → Cheddar → ClickUp: why B2B needs B2C instincts

• 7:33   Why Outlever built its own publication (and dogfooded the thesis)

• 13:00  How to make B2B content go viral without AI slop

• 18:50  Quality vs quantity: the false binary killing content teams

• 22:14  Why one strategic poster beats 150 employees

• 25:37  The two-month consistency rule

• 26:33  'Your blog will never earn an audience'

• 30:17  Everyone says video-first. She's going text-first.

• 32:24  Melissa is excited about banner ads (yes, really)

• 37:00  'Figma should be a little worried'

• 40:04  You don't need a better product to beat a 15-year incumbent

• 43:14  Betting on humans while everyone else bets on AI

• 53:44  $50B incumbents can be beaten in 18 months

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every CMO is being told to replace people with AI agents as fast as possible. Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive, is doing some of that — and deliberately refusing to do other parts of it. The line she's drawn between the two is the most useful rubric we've heard in months.

Attentive runs SMS, email, push, and RCS for thousands of consumer brands — a category where the temptation to automate everything is maximum. But Keri's strongest customer-loyalty moment last year wasn't an AI agent. It was a single text from a real human after a graduation dress arrived without its matching belt. 'I will buy a million more things from them.'

This episode is the rubric: where AI is unlocking near-100% revenue lifts, where iOS 26 just quietly killed 80% of your text marketing, and the customer moment no agent count can replace.

• Why brands using AI hands-off-the-wheel are seeing near 100% revenue lift — and the two customers proving it

• How iOS 26 broke text marketing for 80%+ of devices, and the 2Tap opt-in fix most brands don't know about

• The personalization rubric that gets 91% of consumers to say yes

• The metric CFOs are asking marketing leaders about right now instead of CAC

• The one customer moment that no AI agent can replicate — and why it's the only outcome that matters

Keri McGhee on LinkedIn

Attentive

0:00 Stop Selling AI, Start Proving Outcomes

1:16 What Changed in AI Marketing This Year

2:03 Why 90% of CMOs Experiment, But Few Scale

5:29 Why Attentive Doesn’t Lead With “AI” Anymore

6:32 Channel Affinity: Fewer Messages, Better Revenue

8:06 100% Revenue Lift

10:55 Identity AI and the Send-Time Unlock

12:34 The Best Practice Killing Your Deliverability

14:16 iOS 26 and the New Rules for Text Marketing

15:26 Why 2Tap Matters for SMS Consent

17:41 LLM Discovery, GEO, and the New Search Funnel

21:23 Why Consumers Distrust AI But Use It to Shop

24:22 The Tuckernuck Story: When AI Still Feels Personal

28:27 Why CMOs Have to Get Their Hands Dirty

32:14 The KPI Replacing CAC

34:21 Why Martech Is Consolidating Again

36:31 How to Spot Real AI vs. Rebranded AI

38:00 Stop Counting Agents. Measure the Experience.

43:10 The Skill AI Can Quietly Take From You

44:24 How Brands Should Prep for BFCM

46:38 Lightning Round: Trends, Skills, and Frameworks

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most CMOs think personalization requires complex AI and endless customer segments. Elizabeth Maxson proves otherwise.

She breaks down actionable personalization strategies — from geo-tagging that drove a 51% lift in event attendance to playful homepage tricks that captured marketers' attention and boosted engagement.

The takeaway: Stop overcomplicating personalization. Start with big buckets and simple, contextual changes.

Chapters

00:00 - Why Personalization Should Be Simple

00:32 - First-Time vs Returning vs Current Customers

01:07 - Marketer vs Developer Homepages

03:01 - Geo-Tagging: +51% Attendance

04:28 - The Big Buckets Approach

05:28 - The Lorem Ipsum Attention Hack

06:22 - Ruggable Cat vs Dog Personalization

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when your next customer isn't even human?

Chris Koehler is the CMO of Twilio, and his 2026 marketing plan lasted exactly one month before AI agents forced him to rethink everything. In this conversation, Chris gets real about why planning horizons have collapsed from years to weeks, what happens when AI agents — not humans — are doing the buying, and why brand might matter MORE in an AI-driven world, not less.

Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, a $5B+ customer engagement platform. Previously, he led marketing at Box and helped build the analytics engine at Adobe.

Key takeaways:

• Why using AI to speed up bad processes is the wrong move — you need to reimagine them entirely

• The agent buying continuum: SEO → AEO → human-to-agent → agent-to-agent

• Why brand awareness becomes MORE critical when agents do the discovery

• The 'frozen food vs pizza' framework for the future of software

• How to stop feeling paralyzed: the quadrant exercise he uses to prioritize AI initiatives

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ckoehler/

Learn more: twilio.com

Chapters:

00:00 Meet Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio

01:44 The Healthy Tension Between IT and Marketing

02:44 Planning in Weeks, Not Quarters

04:40 The Rise of Asynchronous AI Work

07:22 Unlearning 30 Years of Marketing

11:37 Frozen Food vs Pizza: The Future of Software

14:07 Content Scarcity to Content Abundance

15:51 Could AI Agents Fix the Privacy Problem?

17:11 The Agent Buying Continuum

22:12 The Tsunami Most People Can't See

24:40 How to Get Embedded in LLM Recommendations

26:33 Does Brand Matter When Agents Are Buying?

31:01 Measuring Success When You Can't Track Anything

33:12 The AI Agent Webinar Experiment

36:44 What Events Look Like in 2029

42:48 How Chris Curates AI Intel Daily

46:22 Advice for Paralyzed CMOs

49:01 Lightning Round

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Merriam-Webster named "slop" the 2025 word of the year - and it explains everything about where AI-generated content is heading.

Elizabeth Maxson, CMO of Contentful, reveals the uncomfortable truth about AI adoption: 96% of CMOs say it's a top priority, but only 65% are making meaningful investments. The gap between enthusiasm and execution is costing teams momentum.

She breaks down research conducted with The Atlantic, surveying 425 global marketing leaders. The findings expose why teams are stuck in experimentation mode, what top performers do differently, and why soft skills matter more than prompt engineering.

We explore evidence-based creativity, the rise of the full-stack marketer, and simple personalization strategies that actually move the needle - including the geo-tagging change that increased event attendance by 51% and the Lorem Ipsum homepage trick that drove 250% more engagement.

If you're tired of tools that promise speed but deliver sameness, this episode is your blueprint for moving from workslop to real strategy.

Chapters:

00:00 The Volume Trap: More Content Doesn't Equal Better Content

01:27 The Optimism-Execution Gap: Why CMOs Aren't Investing

10:05 AI Slop: When You Recognize Your Own ChatGPT Output

13:04 The Homepage Login Discovery

15:50 Why Simple Geo-Tagging Works

18:34 The Lorem Ipsum Homepage Experiment

19:29 Ruggable's Cat People vs. Dog People Strategy

28:00 The NASCAR Slide That Almost Went Wrong

31:17 Hiring Full Stack Marketers: Soft Skills Over Hard Skills

43:00 Course Correction Year: Two Pieces of Homework

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.