In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Ted Hartman, a marketing leader who helped make Little Giant Ladders famous, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Elite messaging and in-house product demos. All the new channels matter, but when a prospect finally lands on your real estate, the message has to acknowledge the problems they have and teach them the solutions you provide. Getting that right is what motivates people once you get them there, and it's where Ted focuses most of his own work.

The second lever is anything but basic. Little Giant built three in-house studios and runs "Little Giant Live" product demonstrations and free ladder safety trainings, delivered the way the team used to demo on job sites. It reaches tradespeople at a scale that flying reps to a central location could never.

Cooling off: When your product is as big and heavy as Little Giant Ladders, spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on Google Ads and Meta to push shipped ecommerce orders doesn't pencil out. Ted's alternative is to know your product, use paid channels to tell a rich story with precise targeting, and send buyers to a nearby brick-and-mortar location where the product is already waiting. The customer gets an easier purchase, and the brand stops paying to ship across the country.

To close, Ted shares what's making him smarter lately: Helping his son build a following as a master Lego creator on YouTube and TikTok.

In this episode:

• Why the message on your own real estate matters more than any new channel
• Co-branded safety trainings with industrial distributors as a value add that scales
• Using OTT and CTV storytelling to drive pickup at nearby locations and protect margin
• The question Ted is studying now: can advertisers stand out to AI?

About the guest: Ted Hartman led marketing at Little Giant Ladders, served as CMO of Inergy, and holds an MBA from BYU. Today he works as a fractional marketing executive who specializes in building marketing from the ground up at young companies, and he serves as a board member and past president of the Honoring Heroes Foundation.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Rachel Poulos, a marketing leader who has built and led teams across performance, brand, and go-to-market for brands like Patagonia, The Met, and The Weather Channel, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Events as a full-system growth channel. After a first full year of running events, Rachel's team rebuilt the channel around a complete system: targeted outreach before the show, a clear booth experience, and a post-event conversion plan that gives sales a step-by-step path to their goals. The results were roughly 6x ROAS last year and a close rate up about 80%. Her take on why it works: events put you face-to-face with highly qualified people, and meeting in person builds trust fast.

Cooling off: Over-reliance on one or two performance channels. Rachel's background is performance marketing, and she is blunt about its limits: leaning on a couple of channels creates a fragile pipeline, and too many teams confuse efficiency with scalability. Just because something is growing doesn't mean it's infinite. If you're only capturing demand and never creating it, it runs out. Her alternative: treat channels as a portfolio. Maintain performance, but balance it with demand creation and growth channels like events, especially as performance costs continue to rise.

To close, Rachel shares what's making her smarter lately: getting back into crocheting, which forces her always-running strategist brain to slow down and focus on exactly where the needle goes next.

In this episode:

• Why events became Rachel's standout growth channel
• The three-part event system: targeted pre-show outreach, a clear booth experience, and a post-event conversion plan
• What a "clear booth" looks like

• Why confusing efficiency with scalability leaves you with a fragile pipeline
• How to balance demand capture with demand creation by managing channels as a portfolio

About the guest: Rachel Poulos is a marketing and advertising leader who has built and led marketing teams across performance, brand, and broader go-to-market strategy, with experience spanning major multi-national brands. She brings a real practitioner's view of the tension marketing leaders at mid-market and enterprise companies face between delivering immediate results and building durable, long-term growth.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Alex McArthur, a brilliant fractional CMO and former Purple CMO who has helped turn several startups into household names, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Iconic ads and the storytelling comeback. Alex sees three things gaining ground. First, AI automation is everywhere, but the winners are pairing the right automations with the right human interactions instead of automating everything. Second, storytelling is more important than ever. With so much AI slop in the feed, people want something real, and brands that are still investing in stories that make people feel something are breaking through. Few brands are making that investment, which is exactly why it works. Third, Alex's personal conviction: If you're going to make an ad, make it iconic. Make the ad that defines the category. An iconic ad introduces differentiation through story while giving the brand an aspirational element. And when you have that asset, run it everywhere. Alex still points to YouTube as one of the largest marketplaces with far less competition for the inventory than on TikTok.

Cooling off: Checklist marketing. Teams that do things because the CEO or the board asked why they're not, but do none of it well. The companies that break through do a couple of things exceptionally well and give their teams room to make something different and memorable.

To close, Alex shares what's making him smarter lately: nightly couch sessions with his son, who has caught the entrepreneurial bug. Getting his son's perspective is reshaping how Alex thinks about his own work

In this episode:

• Why performance-led teams stall without multiplying storytelling
• The shift from viral to iconic: Make the ad everyone talks about

• The AI balance: The right automations mixed with the right human interactions
• Checklist marketing, and why doing everything for the board means doing nothing well
• Shrinking market windows: Find what works, lean in, and scale fast

About the guest: Alex McArthur is a fractional CMO for growth-stage brands. As CMO of Purple, he helped turn a mattress startup into the most searched-for mattress brand in the world, powered by some of the most famous viral video advertising ever made, including a Webby Award winner. He has been named a Utah Business CXO of the Year, served on the Google Retail Advisory Council, and led marketing at Kizik, the hands-free shoe company.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Chandler Hansen, Agility's Director of Marketing, who has built demand engines at high-growth e-commerce, SaaS, and fintech companies, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Personal connection. AI is making content creation easier than ever, ads are increasingly pervasive, and platforms are monetizing every surface they can. The result is a low-trust environment where a real human connection matters as much as anything in the marketing mix. But there's also a warning for teams trying to shortcut it: AI avatars and AI-hosted content have been tested and shown to erode consumer trust. Now is not the time to skip out on human connection.

Cooling off: Over-reliance on paid social and paid search. For years, these channels offered cheap, targeted ads on platforms people used constantly. Now returns are diminishing, engagement costs are spiking, and audiences are tuning out. Chandler's alternative is twofold: get in front of people with a real face-to-face connection, or find cheaper ways to deliver a consistent message that builds mental availability with customers without being annoying or inefficient.

To close, Chandler shares what's making him smarter lately: after years of carrying a digital camera on every trip, he picked up a film camera and is relearning photography from the ground up.

In this episode:

Why AI-everywhere content has created a low-trust environment for buyers

• The personal-connection channels working right now: podcasts, honest LinkedIn, short-form content, events
• Why AI avatars and AI-hosted content erode trust instead of scaling it
• Ad blindness by the numbers: 81% of people say they ignore irrelevant ads
• The alternative: a consistent message that builds mental availability without the ad fatigue

About the guest: Chandler Hansen is Director of Marketing at Agility. He has been in the trenches at high-growth e-commerce, SaaS, and fintech companies, from small startups to enterprise machines operating at scale in the billions.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Jono Andrews, a SaaS marketing leader with close to 15 years driving growth at BambooHR, Podium, Ninety, and Rinsed, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Brand, community, and account-based marketing. Jono says brand is having its moment. Ten years ago, brand was a four-letter word. Now, software categories are so compact that standing out with your story is how you compete, and the foundation is what it has always been: value and trust.

The account-based marketing barrier has collapsed, too. What used to require a massive software investment can now start with something as simple as sending a Crumbl cookie, paired with content strong enough to build value and trust and get the ABM engine moving.

Cooling off: The inbound autopilot and single-channel dependence. Whereas organic used to drive thousands of leads and offset paid budgets, that model has fallen off a cliff. The flood of AI-generated content makes it worse: put crap in, get crap out. The classic demand gen split doesn't carry a company anymore, either.

To close, Jono shares what's making him smarter lately: a self-described big listener, he recommends Acquired for business storytelling and Good Hang whenever you need a pick-me-up.

In this episode:

• Why brand is having its moment: compact categories are won on story, value, and trust
• The ABM barrier to entry is gone: a well-timed Crumbl cookie plus strong content can start the engine software used to gate
• AEO is real: if your ICP lives online, you have to show up in ChatGPT and Claude answers
• The inbound cliff: the SEO engine that drove around 15,000 leads a year at BambooHR doesn't work like that anymore
• PMax skepticism: why "training the algorithm" can feel like funding Alphabet's stock price
• The six-to-eight-week rule: if a bet isn't performing, be mature enough to cut it and redeploy the budget

About the guest: Jono Andrews has spent nearly 15 years in SaaS marketing at some of Utah's largest software companies. At Podium, he led a growth initiative that built a $25 million pipeline in nine months; at Ninety, he helped close a $35 million Series B; and more recently, he served as VP of Marketing at Rinsed. He is now a Marketing Advisor at BlueroomHQ.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Devin Payne, a product marketing leader with 15+ years of experience, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: On-demand content creation. Devin's read is that the way people take in content is changing the same way it did when we went from billboards and radio to websites. Buyers won't wait for the right white paper or hunt for the right solution brief anymore. They want to write a prompt and get a white paper generated on the spot. The catch is doing it responsibly. Devin was building exactly this, a system where customers and the sales team can prompt for content that gets built on the spot, legally approved, on a foundation of pre-set material.

Cooling off: Generic AI content. Everyone using Claude or ChatGPT can now create at light speed, so the bottleneck has moved to consumption. The flood is making a lot of content generic and stale, and Devin compares it to chain restaurants, consistent and competent but not what people actually crave. The fix is customizing three to four levels deeper than we're used to, so the content meets them at the exact moment they're ready to buy. Handmade, not mass-produced.

To close, Devin shares what's making him smarter lately: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is his marketing bible, and he built a project that scores every piece of content one to 10 on whether it's simple, unexpected, and credible before it ships. He's also reteaching himself the piano for 5 to 10 minutes a day.

In this episode:

• Why on-demand content beats the pre-built white paper, and how buyers now expect content generated on the spot
• Product marketing's three core areas, discovery, creation, and enablement
• The consumption bottleneck, everyone creates at light speed now, so relevance wins over volume
• Customizing three to four levels deeper to hit the exact purchase moment

About the guest: Devin Payne has spent 15-plus years in marketing, including product marketing leadership at Vasion, where he helped organizations move off legacy print infrastructure and automate their document workflows, and an earlier run in marketing at eBay. He holds an MBA in entrepreneurship from Westminster College and, since this episode was recorded, has joined Reps Training as its Chief Revenue Officer.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Collin Fleming, a digital media strategist who has spent about 15 years building campaigns for some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Incrementality, proven with randomized control trials. Collin's biggest lever is showing that marketing actually worked. A randomized control trial holds out a slice of the audience by device ID, then measures the lift between what happened with the campaign and what happened without it. Instead of serving the holdout a brand ad, you serve a neutral PSA, so the difference is clean. So, you can tell a client exactly how much you spent and how much incremental revenue it generated, across the full funnel from upper-funnel traffic down to sales. That is the number that lets a client walk into a room of internal champions and win the budget.

Cooling off: Last-click, last-touch attribution. Collin's line: the two jobs where you never lose are HR and search, because in HR, you never fire yourself, and in search, you get all the credit. He points at GA4, built by Google, which leans on last click because that's where search lives. But based on his campaigns, only one in every seven site visits is actually influenced by a click. The other six are view-through: nobody clicks their AirPods during a streaming audio ad or walks up and taps their TV during a CTV spot.

To close, Collin shares what's making him smarter lately: Mamba mentality (he reads a Kobe Bryant quote every morning) and CEO biographies, most recently Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, both stories about finding a way when the odds say it can't be done.

In this episode:

• Why randomized control trials, not geo holdouts, give the cleanest read on incrementality
• How holding out by device ID removes the cross-market noise that breaks geo tests
• The full-funnel lift story that helps clients win internal budget battles
• Why retail media is heating up, with spend projected to near $97 billion by 2028
• The case against last-click: only one in seven site visits is influenced by a click
• Where MMM helps, where it misleads, and why lift studies stay the source of truth

About the guest: Collin Fleming is a Senior Strategy Consultant at Agility who has spent about 15 years building and leading digital media strategies for some of the largest brands in sports and entertainment, including ESPN, Netflix, and Caesars Entertainment. His work spans major campaigns and a career built on proving what marketing actually drives.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Jillian White, one of the sharpest ad ops minds in media, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: premium inventory plus personalization. Jillian's team stopped treating cheap CPMs and big-name premium partnerships as the two extremes and found a middle ground: direct deals across multiple partnerships that let them target custom personas, choose the inventory they run on, and actually measure what works. The payoff is cost-efficiency metrics down about 40%. The second lever is a DCO. Instead of waiting six months to produce a video asset, their dynamic content optimization tool shows them which imagery and CTAs a persona engages with, how long it takes someone to convert, and lets them adjust creative in a few weeks. Premium placement earns brand association and recall. DCO layers on personalization at scale, messaging shaped by the behaviors a user has shown, not a guess about who they are.

Cooling off: looking at channels in silos, and using CPM as your efficiency metric. When you judge Google against Meta against the open internet, one channel at a time, you miss how they work together to get someone to convert, and search ends up taking credit for everything upstream. And CPM is a vanity number. Jillian's team built pixels that optimize for cost per site engagement instead, finding more users who spend real time on site and convert down the line. The shift is from efficiency to effectiveness, from a cheap impression to a measurable one that ties back to ROAS.

To close, Jillian shares what's making her smarter lately: a journal called Dig Deeper that asks her each night what she could have done better and where she's challenged. A daily mirror that makes the hard questions a habit.

In this episode:

- Why premium inventory plus personalization beats chasing the cheapest CPM

- How a direct-deal middle ground cut cost efficiency metrics by 40%

- Using DCO to test imagery and CTAs and refresh creative in weeks, not months

- What you miss when you judge Google, Meta, and the open internet in silos

- Why cost per site engagement is a better north star than CPM

- The shift from efficiency metrics to effectiveness and return on ad spend

About the guest: Jillian White has spent 14 years in media for companies including Subway, Panasonic, Mountain America, and Costa Vida. She has worked across traditional and digital channels for both D2C and B2B, handling everything from implementation to optimization and managing DCO operations across multiple internal teams. She is one of the top ad ops experts in the field.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Greg Edwards, Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: AI-accelerated content and outbound... done with a point of view. Greg's team used to spend months crafting "evergreen" pieces with subject-matter experts, then stretch them for years. Now AI gets them 70% of the way there, and the SME adds the angle only they can. Instead of a single master guide, they ship content tailored to the buyer's exact stage in the funnel. The result: higher-quality MQLs, better conversion to SQLs, and more closed-won. On the outbound side, AI-based SDR tooling scrapes for fit, reads LinkedIn activity, and writes personalized messages that "look honestly more human" than the marketing-speak of old.

The catch Greg keeps coming back to: AI is the average. "If we don't have a specific point of view as a service company, then we are the average of everyone else out there. We're not actually providing any value." The job now is to move at the pace AI makes possible while staying above-average and authentic — avoiding the AI slop that makes every brand sound the same.

Cooling off: traditional SEO and the mass email. Greg has watched organic search traffic fall as AI results eat the clicks, with referral traffic from AI engines rising to fill the gap. His advice for marketers who built a career on Google: restructure your back-end content for AI optimization, and lean harder into conversion rate optimization.

To close, Greg shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: prepping for a two-week family vacation, and finishing an AI-for-marketing course.

In this episode:

• Why AI gets you ~70% of the content, and why your point of view has to do the rest
• How "timely and specific" beats "evergreen" — and lifts MQL-to-closed-won
• Using AI SDR tooling for personalized outbound that reads as human
• What AI Overviews and zero-click search are doing to organic traffic
• Why conversion rate optimization is the new home for SEO talent
• Why the mass email blast is dying and what replaces it

About the guest: Greg Edwards is Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint. He spent 15+ years in digital marketing, cutting his teeth at Orange Soda, then Inside Out Development, is master-certified in account-based marketing, and holds an MBA from UVU. Early in his career, he spent time in Shanghai and speaks Mandarin.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Bryan Phelps, founder and CEO of Big Leap, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in modern marketing.

Heating up: audience-first, not channel-first. Bryan makes the case for what some call "search everywhere optimization" — the idea that being found is no longer about ranking on Google, but about showing up everywhere your ideal customer already spends time. For some brands, that's Pinterest and Reddit more than Google. As Bryan puts it, the goal is to "contribute to those communities versus try to take from those communities."

Cooling off: single-channel attribution. The old model, where your brand is found on search, click, convert, "rarely happens anymore." Bryan walks through why zero-click behavior and AI-mode search results are blurring the clean line between spend and outcome: a conversion that looks like paid search might actually have started in an AI chat. His fix is to focus on the cause and effect of marketing. "We almost need to go back a little farther now," he says, "to the cause and effect, the correlations, the incrementality testing."

The throughline: marketers who look at channels in silos keep making the same mistake. "When you cut that spend because it's not directly performing, it removes performance elsewhere." The teams winning right now are the ones open-minded enough to see how brand advertising lifts branded search, how branded search lifts paid search, and how all pieces move together.

The conversation also gets into what AI means for marketing careers, like why deep single-channel specialists may need to go broader, and why the real skill is increasingly about pulling the whole mix together.

To close, Bryan shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: getting off LinkedIn, out of the AI hype cycle, and onto a Utah golf course. "It's easy to feel like everyone else has it figured out and you're behind," he says. "That's not always the case."

In this episode:

• Why "SEO" has become "search everywhere optimization"
• How to find your audience beyond Google, Meta, and the usual channels
• What zero-click search and AI overviews are doing to attribution
• Why incrementality testing is making a comeback — and why your CFO belongs in the conversation
• The hidden cost of cutting spend in a single channel
• How AI is reshaping marketing roles and career paths

About the guest: Bryan Phelps is the founder and CEO of Big Leap, a brand-led performance marketing agency he started in 2008. He's grown the company onto the Inc. 5000 and Utah's Best Companies to Work For lists, now scales that playbook across Setfire Creative and Leadgenics, and is a Forbes Agency Council contributor and Utah 40 Under 40 honoree.

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