Shane Hedge and Ariel Rubin are the CEO and Head of Content of Air respectively. Air is a Creative Ops Platform used by enterprise creative teams at companies like Google, Warby Parker, Perplexity, Ramp, and the Denver Broncos.

They’re at 100 employees, raised $70M in total ($35M Series B last year), just won a Webby Award for best creative AI, and have cut marketing spend by 90% and CAC by 70% over a period of 18 months using creative, unusual marketing.

Some of their stunts include:

* taking out a full page ad in the New York Times called “AI would never smoke a cigarette with you” handwritten by Shane, with his real, PERSONAL phone number attached

* Partnering with OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue

* Shane traveling to a remote island in Iceland to trap the “best air ever” in a jar and documenting it

* hiring elderly actors to stage a protest outside Adweek’s Commerceweek conference, holding signs like “Dropbox needs botox” and “I was 28 when I started downloading this file,” complete with a fake news crew

* hiring the comedian Kareem Rahma as their Chief Imagination Officer, releasing a series of (fake) podcast clips of him making ridiculous points about creative work, then abruptly “firing” him, then “rehiring” him and making a mockumentary of it

In this episode, we talk about what makes a great marketing campaign, how to go viral, how they operationalize creative work at Air, why "trust" not "budget" is the bottleneck for great campaigns, and the 3-lane marketing team structure they run without a CMO.

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We discuss:

* The aha moment that turned Air into the most creative company in B2B

* What makes a viral campaign idea

* How to convince your CEO to take more risks with your marketing

* How to operationalize creative work

* Why Air keeps a separation between “state” & “church” within their marketing org

* Why one (big) campaign per month is the right cadence

* The only thing that makes a risky idea work

* Why Air refused to touch AI until Nano Banana dropped in Oct 2024

* Ariel’s case for “discernment” over “taste”

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Connect with Shane and Ari:

Shane’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanehegde/

Ari’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arieljrubin/

Air: https://air.inc/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

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Some of my takeaways:

* When you can’t afford to put media spend behind your creative, you’re forced to make something people actually want to watch organically. Use this constraint wisely

* If you need to educate your CEO on why marketing matters, run.

* The signal Ari looks for in a CEO that gets creative or values it: when you bring an idea, do they respond with “yes and how do we make it bigger? / where can it show up? / what if we did it like this? …” or with “let me think about it”?

* Air splits their marketing org into three lanes:- Content (run by Ari as Head of Content, basically their internal agency): community, brand, social, campaigns- Marketing (run by Jeffrey Tousignant as Head of Marketing): lifecycle, conferences, product marketing- Growth (currently hiring a Head of Growth - this is your chance): paid, AEO/SEO, GTM engineering, deep conversion

The interesting parts (to me):

- They all sit on the same level and each report to the two co-founders. Usually the Head of Content would report into the Head of Marketing/CMO. Air doesn’t have a CMO.

- They each cover the full funnel. Even though the teams get scored differently (listen to the pod), the Content Team under Ari does not “just” do top of funnel, they also cover bottom of funnel with their community efforts. Same with Jeff with marketing.

* My favorite quote from Ari: “We live in a world of takes now and everyone’s just offering takes. It’s easy to have ideas. Show me how you’re going to ship the f*****g thing”

Domitille de Saint-Exupéry is the CMO and Erwan Gauthier is the VP Growth at lemlist, the multi-channel outreach platform founded by Guillaume Moubeche.

They’re bootstrapped, doing mid 8-figures in revenue, added over $10m in net new ARR in 2025, have 180 employees, and recently acquired Claap, an AI meeting notetaker.

In this episode, we talk about how to grow in a massively crowded market, their full marketing budget breakdown, what worked and didn’t, their biggest bet for 2026, why lemlist spends roughly 10x less on ads than competitors at their stage, and more.

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Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify

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We discuss:

* Tips on growing in an insanely crowded market

* Their 2025 marketing budget: turning $1.2M total marketing spend into $31M net new ARR, broken down by channel

* Spending $60k on influencers & lemlist’s Linkedin playbook

* How to run a proper pilot/experiment for influencer marketing in your own company - and how to frame it to your CEO/CMO

* Breakdown of lemlist’s approach to AEO (reddit agency, G2, Wikipedia, atyla.io)

* How lemlist measures and attributes brand

* Their biggest marketing bet for 2026

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Connect with Domitille and Erwan:

Dom’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domitilledesaintexupery/

Erwan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erwanxgrowth/

lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com/

Claap: https://www.claap.io/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

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Other links and resources:

My interview with lemlist founder Guillaume Moubeche: https://www.executivebrand.org/p/bootstrapped-to-26m-arr-guillaume-32e

My interview with lemlist CEO Charles Tenot: https://www.executivebrand.org/p/lemlist-ceos-linkedin-playbook-33m-fb7

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Some of my personal takeaways:

* lemlist spends roughly 10x less on ads than competitors at their stage, because they built brand first. Domitille’s actual line: “distribution is the moat today, maybe even more important than your own product and content.” Most of their pipeline still comes from branded SEO and direct traffic, the boring metric nobody wants to hear.

* “No one is writing any posts for other people at lemlist.” They don’t ghostwrite for employees. If you want to post, post. If you don’t, don’t. But they DO carefully train external influencers on narrative + use cases, and those are the posts they boost with ads.

* Influencer is a brand channel, not a performance channel and it’s their biggest budget increase in 2026. Their attribution: reach * average conversion rate to estimate revenue per post, then subtract that from the brand bucket so they don’t double count. They treat it as a brand investment with a halo effect they can’t fully track. To test it yourself take 5-15 creators, 3 posts each, ~$50k starting budget.

* 70% of lemlist’s own users still spray and pray because it’s easier. Their entire 2024-2025 narrative was “stop blasting, send the right message at the right time.” And yet 70% of their own users are ignoring it. This is the gap every B2B SaaS company underestimates: positioning doesn’t change behavior, enablement does. Templates, tutorials, GTM Engineer playbooks, that’s what closes the narrative-to-execution gap, not better positioning.

* The AEO playbook is already running. For LLM ranking: a Reddit agency posting threads on specific subreddits (LLMs love Reddit because it’s “human advice”), heavy investment in G2 reviews, and a newly created Wikipedia page. They use atyla.io to track LLM mentions

* “If you don’t have budget and you’re not in a mature market, just abort mission.” The budget x market maturity matrix:

* Mature market + real budget → sweet spot, do everything

* Mature market + small budget + a great AI-native product → capture existing demand, kill the competition, skip top-of-funnel entirely

* Small budget + immature market → don’t bother

Renée Shaw runs brand & social at tl;dv - an AI meeting assistant. She’s also one of the funniest people on LinkedIn. Her official job title is your mom @ tl;dv…

We talk about humor, how Renée runs her content strategy, information cascades, Linkedin’s algorithm, coming up with funny ideas, and why she has content scheduled our for 4 (!!!) months ahead.

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We discuss:

* Why there’s no strategy behind tl;dv’s comedy skits - and why that makes it work

* Renée's content system: Google Keep + Obsidian + Claude

* What “information cascades” have to do with LinkedIn’s algorithm and why some posts go viral, but not others

* How to correctly mention your product in comedy content

* Why AI can’t write jokes - but what it’s good at instead

* Her guaranteed ways NOT to be funny

* Andy Kaufman, Rick Rubin, and why the best creators eventually stop caring about the reaction

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Connect with Renée:

Renée’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeeshaw/

Renée’s newsletter: unsupervisednewsletter.substack.com

tl;dv: https://tldv.io/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

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Some takeaways:

* Renee’s whole thesis is that people can feel when you want it too much. tl;dv’s content works because she’d be posting on LinkedIn whether or not anyone was paying her and the job didn’t change the energy, it just funded it. The second “being authentic” becomes a strategy, it stops being authentic. You can’t engineer nonchalance.

* When you mention your product, make it uncomfortably obvious rather than trying to blend it in. tl;dv puts tl;dv as a poll option in polls that have nothing to do with tl;dv, purely because it’s ridiculous. The logic: “If you ever need a meeting recorder, you’re going to think of us.” No faking excitement about features. No disguising it as content.

* Renee having four months of content scheduled isn’t a batching trick because the queue is her editing process. If she keeps pushing a post to the back, that’s the signal it’s not that funny. Three months in and she hasn’t touched it? It dies. No formal editing pass. The delay does that work automatically.

* You can’t take a real bet on being funny until you have psychological and financial safety. That’s Renee’s actual answer to “can you teach humor?”. If you’re in compliance or cybersecurity and a joke lands wrong, that’s a career problem. Wanting to be funny but also safe is a contradiction.

* Threads is Renee’s comedy club because its the equivalent of a small venue where comedians work out new material before the main show. One-liners go there first, no LinkedIn reputation on the line. If something does well, it moves to LinkedIn. Every creator needs a channel where they can safely bomb.

Abhay Rajaram is the co-CEO at Sendoso, a Direct Mail and Gifting Platform doing over $100M in annual revenue with 250 employees. They raised a total of $175M, including a $100M Series C led by SoftBank in 2021 during peak ZIRP. Abhay joined in 2023 when the business was struggling, first as Chief Business Officer, then stepping into the co-CEO role to lead a full turnaround.

In this episode, we talk about what it looks like to lead a SaaS turnaround after raising at peak valuations, what Abhay made the one single metric he rallied the entire company around, how to build trust with your team, board & founder when the company is walking a tightrope, and much more.

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We discuss:

* Why Abhay deliberately delayed focusing on new business growth when he first joined

* The “trust triangle framework” that allowed Sendoso to improve employee NPS by over 50 points in 2.5 years - and why it matters so much

* Managing board & investor expectations after a massive 2021 $100m Series C

* The two ways to position your company in an “AI-only” world

* Abhay’s 3 keys to working with founders (very important when stepping into a C-level role, especially CEO)

* The tension between impatience and patience

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Connect with Abhay:

Abhay’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhayrajaram/

Sendoso: https://sendoso.com/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* Sendoso had product-market fit and $175M raised, but the business was struggling when Abhay joined. Net retention had been masking gross retention issues during the ZIRP years. He made retention the one metric he rallied the entire company around. That meant deliberately delaying focusing on new business growth, at a company that had raised a massive $100M round by Softbank with very high growth expectations. He talks about how he navigated those conversations with the board and investors. Takes courage + discipline + radical candor to pull it off

* The trust triangle (by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss): authenticity (are you the real you?), empathy (do you care about people’s success?), logic (is your judgment actually sound?). Abhay’s point: the first two are relatively easy. The third is the one that earns or breaks trust. You have to prove that your strategy works before people truly buy-in. One of Sendoso’s longest-tenured employees came to him after a few months and said “I didn’t know if we could pull it off, but I’m starting to believe now.” That’s the logic part kicking in. It kinda applies to exec brands too, authenticity and empathy get you attention, but it’s the logic (results, proof, specifics) that converts attention into trust

* Abhay’s framework for working with founders:

* match their speed, what he calls “scrappy mode” vs “scale mode” (btw scrappy does NOT mean crappy)

* understand the why behind the 50 ideas they throw at you

* earn credibility by actually being deep in the details - founders sniff out surface-level knowledge instantly

* They improved employee NPS by 50+ points in 2.5 years. Not by plastering new “values” on their walls, but through boring, good-old consistency over a long period of time: sharing bad news honestly in All-Hands, Abhay personally following up with employees, reaching out for birthdays, giving people shout-outs, celebrating wins HARD while being honest about the current challenges.

* Off topic, but his was Abhay’s first podcast EVER. Luckily only uphill from here for him. But the fact that the CEO of a $100m+ company hasn’t done a single podcast until now tells you how heads-down he’s been

Tim Soulo is the CMO at Ahrefs. Over the last 10 years, he helped bootstrap them to now well over $100M ARR - with only 160 employees, no sales team, no outbound, and zero marketing attribution.

In this episode, we talk about how Ahrefs got to $100M+ ARR while being super scrappy, why the best marketing is built on common sense rather than quarterly plan, and how Tim personally uses Claude Code and Lovable every day to keep Ahrefs lean & mean.

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We discuss:

* How Ahrefs got to $100M ARR and the list of things they decided NOT to do to focus

* How Tim went from “AI skeptic” to vibe coding a full LinkedIn engagement tracker in a single afternoon + other vibe coded tools

* Tim’s advice for CMOs who haven’t worked with Claude Code yet

* How to run marketing on intuition instead of quarterly planning and reporting

* The “battle webinar” format Tim created with Glenn Allsopp

* Why every piece of content should be a sales page for your product - and why that sidesteps the “prove ROI on thought leadership” debate

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Connect with Tim:

Tim’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/

Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/

Podcast: https://ahrefs.com/podcast

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* Tim didn’t know you were “supposed to” have a sales team, he just assumed people should find your website, sign up, pay (there’s no free trial), and that’s it. Only now, at quite a bit over $100m ARR, are they starting to build out an enterprise sales motion. I think there’s a pattern where ignorance of the “best practices” can often lead to better outcomes

* Ahrefs runs marketing with no Google Analytics installed, no attribution setup, no A/B testing, no retargeting, no discounting, no free trial (!!!), no quarterly plans, and no formal reporting. The fact that they’ve been able to scale to the point that they have should already be a massive wakeup call for many CMOs and marketers. Tim’s answer for how they make decisions instead? Intuition and common sense. They decide what to do based on what talent they have, what formats they’re comfortable with, what makes sense, and what sounds exciting. I’ve done 140+ episodes with founders and marketing leaders, and consistently, the companies that are doing the best marketing all seem to prioritize things that *seem fun to them*. 37signals, PostHog, Clay… Tim is another data point here

* Tim’s repurposing framework is the opposite of what everyone teaches. Instead of taking a podcast and chopping it into 15 LinkedIn posts, he starts with a LinkedIn post, tests the hook, reads the comments, then turns it into an article incorporating all the feedback, then combines multiple articles into a conference presentation, then discusses that presentation on a podcast. Small → big, not big → small. The bigger the content piece, the more signal you want, and he builds that signal by layering validated, small ideas. Not sure I agree here, Garyvee and Hormozi seem to be counter examples

* Tim built a full LinkedIn engagement tracker with Claude Code in one afternoon. It looks at his post engagements, enriches contacts through Apollo, pulls Ahrefs domain data, and shows him which companies are engaging with his content, sorted by ad spend and organic traffic. This is a CMO at a $100M+ company building his own social selling tool after lunch. We discover other vibe coded tools he built

* Tim believes every piece of content you publish should be a sales page for your product. “Thought leadership” is overrated. If you publish an article, and within that article you mention a relevant feature of your product, and it gets 10k visits, if people don’t convert, that’s a product problem, not a marketing problem. As a marketer, you did your job: you got the attention of relevant people and showed them something relevant. It sidesteps the entire attribution/ROI debate

I’m trying something new. This week, instead of interviewing a founder or executive, I took my Content Director Tobi and we’re going behind the scenes at Project 33 to talk about what we’re currently building, seeing, and experimenting with - across our own content and 15+ executive clients. Thinking of making this a recurring series.

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What we discuss:

* The group interview format one customer pitched us that could change how we create content

* Tobi’s first LinkedIn post goes live

* The Clay + Jungler workflow we’re building to turn organic LinkedIn engagement into pipeline

* Why TL ads with a $5k/month budget can do more for pipeline than most companies realize

* Using Fibbler to connect LinkedIn ad engagement to influenced revenue

* The AI-powered ideation workflow we’re building

* How/why we cut our client onboarding from 3 to 1 week

* The “gold standard” for executive content interviews

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Connect with us:

Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Tobi’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-moelenkamp/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

I was recently a guest on the SteadyRev podcast by Austin Futers. I rarely share my own perspectives on my podcast, and I want to change that.

In this episode, I talk about how to grow on LinkedIn, what’s good content, how to get ROI from posting, the role of commenting, how I’d start from zero today, and more.

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We I talk about:

* Why the people who do well on LinkedIn just do the basics really well - and what “the basics” are

* The 1 thing that will guarantee that your posts will tank

* What a comment I left under someones posts, that hit 130k impressions & 400 likes, actually proves

* Why Adam Robinson spends $20 per month in contractors, freelancers, and equipment on his Linkedin content

* The false idea that “good” and “bad” content is subjective

* Why most successful Linkedin creators are known for one format, not five, and why that matters to you

* How I would grow my LinkedIn from 0 today

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Some things I believe about LinkedIn:

* Every time I get too busy and stop engaging, answering comments, DMing people, my engagement drops, even when I feel like the content is the same quality. I don’t know if that’s the algorithm or just human reciprocity. I just know it’s true, so I just make it part of my day.

* If you approach LinkedIn from an ROI standpoint on day 1 and ask how many leads this is going to generate, you’re going to do it wrong. And you’re going to quit before it works. There are people who turned LinkedIn into a legit lead gen channel. Eg. Adam Robinson - but he also spends over $20,000 a month between employees, contractors, and equipment, as well as 10ish hours of his own time every week. But if that’s not you, you should think about LinkedIn as a brand play.

* On the flip side, the companies that stick with us for 2+ years almost always hit a moment in the first 3-6 months where it becomes obvious it’s worth it. They generate one great demo, two VPs at a conference walk up to the CEO and mention their content, a partner forwards your videos to their sales team. Stuff like that shows you that this is working.

* There is good and bad content. The false belief that it’s all random, that you just need to find what went viral and make it your own take. That is what makes people produce garbage. Your content is the product. When I write something, I ask: would a real person, like a VP of Marketing at a SaaS company doing 10m ARR, someone whose face I can actually picture, find this valuable enough to forward it? If the answer is no, don’t post it. This kind of content takes real work.

* Most people who do well are known for one format, not five. There’s almost no one crushing who does a video on Monday, an infographic on Tuesday, text on Wednesday, selfie on Thursday, AND doing all of it well. They’re usually known for one thing and they just get really good at it. Anthony Pierri from Fletch for inforgraphics. Gal Aga for text-only. Chris Walker for video-only back in the day. Everything works. Video, text, infographics, carousels. Everything. But an infographic doesn’t work because it’s an infographic, it works because it’s a great infographic.

* The people who do really well do the basics really well. What are the basics? (1) Add value, (2) actually engage with others, (3) be yourself, and (4) keep showing up. Do that for 12-24 months and there’s a very small chance you’ll not at least have built a decent audience that actually likes & trusts you. It’s when people think they can shortcut it, copy what went viral, say something controversial they don’t actually believe, make up stuff that isn’t true, that’s when it falls apart.

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Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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Thanks for interviewing me Austin:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-futers/

Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@AustinFuters

Louis Grenier is the founder of Stand The F*ck Out, and one of my recent favorite new follows on LinkedIn.

In this episode, we talk about what a real POV actually is (and why 99% of LinkedIn creators don’t have one), why low likes on a post don’t mean what you think they mean, the one marketing truth most companies are completely ignoring in 2026, and much much more.

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We discuss:

* The 4-step Stand the F*ck Out framework

* Differentiation vs. distinctiveness

* What a good POV actually is

* How he closed six-figure contracts from Linkedin posts that got almost zero engagement

* The “100% intensity” thesis to standing out

* Marketing truths too many B2B / SaaS companies are forgetting (again)

* Spending over $10k on a YouTube miniseries - for B2B??

* Why he stopped his podcast after 2 million downloads, and what he’d do differently if he starting a new one today

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Connect with Louis:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisgrenier/

Stand The F*ck Out: https://www.stfo.io/

Stand The F*ck Out Book: https://www.amazon.com/Stand-Out-No-Nonsense-Positioning-Business/dp/B0DVH5C8SP

The Roost Community: https://www.stfo.io/roost

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* A point of view is not a hot take machine. Louis draws a sharp line between having random opinions and having a point of view, and most people on Linkedin are doing the first and calling it the second. A real POV is a consistent thread baked into everything you put out. His: “What you’ve been taught about marketing is mostly wrong. And it’s not your fault because you’re surrounded by b******t.” He never names names, but he calls out the culture of the category.

* Louis has closed six-figure deals from posts with almost no likes. His whole LinkedIn philosophy is that posts are just a signal flare. The real value is the one DM it triggers from the right person, and that DM turns into a real conversation, which turns into a deal. He genuinely doesn’t care about like counts, because he’s watched low-engagement posts lead directly to five- and six-figure contracts.

* Differentiation vs. distinctiveness are two completely different games. Differentiation is positioning: we solve a problem others don’t.

Distinctiveness is branding: we get noticed through assets that could be completely arbitrary (orange profile pic, a swear word in the name). Louis’s point is that past a certain company size, true differentiation is rare, but distinctiveness is always available. Most large companies are working on a differentiation problem that doesn’t exist for them anymore, when distinctiveness is the actually problem.

* Nobody buys because they're in pain. They buy when a trigger event causes them to move. Louis's example: back pain for 10 years doesn't get someone to the physio. Grandkids visiting and wanting to walk to the park does. The marketing version: stop obsessing over the pain your customer has and start obsessing over the specific moments in time that make them go from not moving to moving. He believes that a half-page of trigger events beats a 50-page strategy deck every time.

* Louis’s writing advice: start by posting a lot, because the feedback loops on Linkedin are fast and you learn quickly what lands. Then move to quality, but don’t over-optimize to audience response, because chasing engagement too hard turns you into someone who only says what people already want to hear. “If you optimize the website too much, it turns into a porn site.” Once you’ve built taste, then you can think about systems and volume.

Pranav Piyush is the CEO of Paramark, a marketing measurement platform. Prior to founding Paramark, he was VP Marketing at BILL, VP Growth at Pilot.com and VP Growth at Magento during its acquisition by Adobe. After 10+ years in marketing and growth, he has strong opinions on why most marketers are getting measurement wrong.

In this episode, we talk about why the brand vs performance marketing distinction is a false dichotomy, how to measure channels that don’t produce a click, the exact experiment framework Pranav is running at Paramark right now, and much more.

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We discuss:

* Why complacency killed brand marketing, and what a book from 1923 about broomstick-selling has to do with it

* Pranav’s case for why brand marketing is a false concept

* The two metrics every new CMO should align on with their CEO and CFO in month #1

* Why he believes that for 90% of companies their win rate wouldn’t change if product marketing, enablement, and customer marketing all stopped tomorrow

* Pranav’s “10 experiments in year 1” playbook

* How Paramark is geo-testing Google competitor ads in New York only - at a small scale

* Pranav’s approach to LinkedIn founder branding

* Why Pranav’s posts get “only” 20-50 likes but he’s getting inbound from public companies and AI hyperscalers who never liked a single post

* The signal that your organic LinkedIn has hit its ceiling and it’s time to go paid

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Connect with Pranav

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranavp/

Paramark: https://paramark.com/

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Mentions

Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (1923): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Advertising-Claude-C-Hopkins/dp/1453821082

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* Pranav on why brand is suddenly “back”: it’s not that brand became more important, it’s that digital channels saturated. When Google and Meta were growing from zero to billions of users, you could ride those channels’ growth without great creative. Now user growth is tapped out, CPMs are climbing, and the only differentiator left is - again - creative, storytelling, and emotion.

* “Brand marketing” as a category is basically just “stuff that’s hard to measure” and Pranav hates that definition. It’s a self-fulfilling vicious cycle, because your measurement framework defines what counts as brand vs. performance, not anything inherent about the channel. A direct mail campaign in the 1920s selling broomsticks through artistic positioning was simultaneously brand AND performance marketing.

* The two metrics a CMO should report on: search volume (Google + LLMs + everywhere else people type your name into a search bar) and hand raisers (demo requests, sign ups etc). Everything else is noise

* For a new CMO’s first year: plan 10 real experiments, expect 7-8 to fail, and the 1-2 winners will fuel your growth. But the key detail is what counts as an experiment. It’s not think that could bring a 5% optimization gain, he means bets that could drive 50-100% growth. And where do you get ideas for those bets? Research your audience’s media consumption habits. Literally ask them: what’s on your phone home screen, what’s the last podcast you shared, what TV show are you watching? That tells you where to show up.

* Pranav’s geo-testing experiment shows you can do incrementality at small scale. They’re launching competitor Google search ads only in New York, keeping every other state as a control. If New York traffic spikes and Texas stays flat, the only variable was the search ads

* Pranav gets around 20-50 likes on his LinkedIn posts. It’s good, but far from viral. Others in his space get 10x that. He doesn’t care. Why? Public companies are booking demos. Heads of Paid Media are DMing him after his podcast episodes. An AI hyperscaler reached out who had never liked a single post. Views and likes are not the measure of success when you’re selling into enterprise. If your ICP is CMOs spending $20M-$100M+ on marketing, those people are not impressed by fluffy “10 cool ChatGPT prompts” content. They’re trying to improve their conversations with their CFO. It’s obvious when you say it, but you need to match your content to the buyer, not the algorithm. Then use thought leadership ads to amplify reach beyond your organic network.

Jess Cook and Joshua Perk are the VP of Marketing and CEO of Vector respectively, which is a marketing signal platform. They also host “This Meeting Could Have Been a Podcast”, have a combined 50,000 LinkedIn followers, and actually have fun with their marketing.

In this episode, we talk about how they built one of the most entertaining podcasts in B2B marketing, how they’re using LinkedIn holistically as a growth channel, and why the things that work best in marketing are always the hardest to measure.

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We discuss:

* Why their first podcast concept ”Funnel Cake” flopped, and how Jess pivoted the entire show in 24 hours

* The prep that goes into filming an entire season for their podcast in 2 days

* Why livestreamers get the most applause, and what that means for your content strategy

* How Jess uses Claude projects to turn bi-weekly interviews with her founders into LinkedIn posts + how they outgrew that

* 58% of followers came from comments, not posts, and what LinkedIn is signaling us with that

* How Vector… uses Vector

* The micro-events strategy that closed 100% of attendees (yes, actually)

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Connect with Jess and Josh:

Jess Cook’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesscook-contentmarketing/

Joshua Perk’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaperk/

Vector: https://www.vector.co/

This Meeting Could Have Been a Podcast: https://vector.transistor.fm/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* When Jess asked marketer friends what they’d want to hear a VP of Marketing and CEO talk about, every answer was basically what was already on their agendas for their 1-on-1s. That has become the show. Some of the best podcast concepts come from what’s already happening, not what sounds good on paper.

* $4,000 for a studio day that produces a podcast 80% of open opportunities listen to vs $6,000 in Clay credits for 10,000 cold emails that get a 0.1% response rate Founders get perceived value wrong constantly.

* Attribution is a mechanism of control. As companies grow, they introduce attribution, not because it makes marketing better, but because someone five layers removed from the campaign needs to prove their dollars went somewhere. Actual great marketing takes courage, taste, intuition and, partly, doing the opposite of what everyone else / best practice says is the right approach

* Jess’s LinkedIn workflow for her founders: interview them every two weeks, run transcripts through AI trained on their voice, hand them posts. Once Josh understood the mechanics, and got addicted to posts doing well, he started writing more of his own content

* Every single prospect from their first dinner event converted to a closed deal. They mixed in existing customers to have advocates present, kept it small, and made the whole thing feel like a fun night out rather than a networking event. Now they’re scaling it into the “Ghost Tour Tour” (see their mascot) - a dinner plus a walking ghost tour in whatever city they’re in, with concert-style merch listing all the tour stops

* People should be able to become fans from a single clip (Jess learned this from Devin Reed). It happened a couple times that someone saw one 60-second clip, walked up to them at an event, and said “I love your show.” When they asked what their favorite episode is, they didn’t have one - they’ve only seen clips. Which is ok. Don’t aim for subscribers/followers, but moments that stick.