The Narrative

Why Vimeo pivoted stopped measuring press hits and started tracking brand perception | Ronda Morra

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Vimeo sits at an inflection point familiar to many B2B companies: balancing a 21-year legacy in the creator space while scaling an enterprise business most customers don't know exists. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ronda Morra, VP of Corporate Marketing & Communications at Vimeo, who leads corporate marketing, external communications, internal communications, organic social, and customer marketing. Ronda shares how she's navigating the rapid shift from search engine optimization to AI engine optimization, building third-party narrative engines, and measuring what actually matters when your narrative is working.

Topics Discussed:
  • Positioning dual audiences: legacy creators versus enterprise buyers 
  • Taking a public stance on AI content training as competitive differentiation 
  • Cross-functional testing frameworks for customer storytelling 
  • The mechanics of AEO versus SEO: speed, pickup, and LLM surfacing 
  • Building internal certification programs that create external market value 
  • Press release relevance in the LLM era 
  • Shifting measurement from press hits to brand perception metrics
    • GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
    • Draw lines in the sand on divisive issues before you're forced to: Three weeks into his tenure, Vimeo's CEO asked their creator community whether the company could train AI on their content. The resounding "no" became policy—while competitors were backpedaling on similar decisions. Ronda noted this wasn't just values theater: "it's been a true differentiator for us." The lesson isn't to be contrarian—it's to identify the 2-3 issues where your ICP has strong opinions, poll them directly, and commit publicly before market events force reactive damage control.
    • Build task forces with production accountability, not just strategy input: Ronda's customer storytelling task force included her team, production, and paid social—critically, the people who had to actually build and distribute the content. They tested multiple formats before landing on short-form video optimized for "that TikTok quick hit" attention span. Most cross-functional committees fail because they lack execution skin in the game. Include the people who will be held accountable for production and distribution outcomes, not just strategic advisors.
    • AEO delivers faster signal than SEO, but requires different content structure: When Vimeo mentioned 2 Chainz in a press release about their Reframe conference, they saw "immediate uptick of the LLMs picking it up" versus SEO's "long game." Ronda's framework: AEO surfaces structured, entity-rich content (names, titles, specific claims) faster than traditional search indexing. Structure content with clear entities, credentials, and factual claims that LLMs can extract and cite. Don't just optimize keywords—optimize for extraction.
    • Design content refresh loops, not content creation sprints: Customer video testimonials require significant production lift. Rather than treating them as annual recreations, Ronda's team embeds in quarterly business reviews with customer success to capture updated metrics. They then "quickly update the existing video content with some tweaks to the end of the video itself"—updating the summary statistics without full reproduction. The shift: move from content-as-campaign to content-as-living-asset with systematic refresh triggers.
    • Your internal ICP teams should own customer-facing programs for that ICP: Vimeo's internal comms team leads the company's certification program development because internal communicators are a key ICP. As Ronda explains: "they are the ones we're selling to." They built an internal intranet (named "the Loop" via employee contest) that became the reference architecture for selling to other internal comms teams. If you sell to engineers, your engineering team should co-create your developer experience. If you sell to marketers, your marketing team should lead customer marketing programs.
    • Track narrative consistency across third parties, not message penetration: Ronda measures success by asking: "Are you more consistently described by others?" Not whether your messaging landed, but whether disparate third parties—analysts, customers, press—use similar language to describe you without prompting. This requires systematic social listening and analyst brief analysis to track linguistic consistency, not sentiment scores. If five different sources describe you five different ways, your narrative isn't working regardless of positive sentiment.
    • Press releases aren't dead—they're LLM training data: The announcement of 2 Chainz at Vimeo's Reframe conference "saw immediate uptick of the LLMs picking it up" in a way that Ronda found faster and more measurable than traditional SEO. Her take: press releases now function as structured training data for AI systems. Include specific entities (names, titles, numbers, dates) that LLMs can extract and surface in response to queries. Format for machine parsing, not just human reading.

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