Major Brands Are Now Hiring Agencies On LinkedIn, The New 2025 GTM Playbook, The Future Of Content Marketing, Why Vibe Marketing Is BS

0:00I found this article on Adage today, but I talked about this on your yesterday call before I even saw this adage post. what we've been doing is we've been going on LinkedIn because we've been noticing more companies talk about RFPs and saying, Hey, we're looking for an agency for X, Y, and Z. And we've been responding to them and we've been getting included in RFPs from that. And it's a new way for us to generate more RFPs. So I saw Nick respond to somebody and this company maybe called, they had 200 to 500 employees, but he positioned it for your SMB division. And he's like, Hey, would like to be included but you look at the comment section there's so many comments in there but like what i love is i like i love his house i like that nick's out there he knows that you guys get a lot of leads still but he's hustling out there yes and he's probably doing it manually right now in my sense you can probably get a semi-automated you know very soon so yeah this is where you can have a manis come in by the way and help you with this this is where you can one shot it yeah the hard part isn't responding it only takes him it's finding them it's finding them Yeah.

1:02So this is where an AI would be helpful. Yes. Yeah. Like a done with you, not done for you. We're not quite a done for you yet, guys. The hard part about AI in this is if everyone's using AI to log in, I bet you're going to start seeing the technology or the IP address started getting blocked. Maybe. I wonder if they're constantly switching the IP addresses too. And they're using different VPNs or whatever. So beyond my pay grade. I'm assuming a lot of the solutions aren't doing it yet because there's not as much demand from the AI to continually go and scrape. But they will be because as consumers pay for more of these features or start using it more in these scenarios, they have no choice but to rotate up the IPs.

1:42We'll see what happens. Okay, so you have... Okay, let's... And wait to go really quick back. The reason I believe these platforms will start banning AIs from crawling is they don't want AI to go there. See, if you're a user of the platform and you're going to respond and you're logging in, you're creating page views and you may click on an ad so they can make money from you. If an AI bot just goes and keeps crawling and then even responding, yeah, they're getting page views, but none of those people are gonna click on ads so it doesn't make the platforms money. It goes against how they generate cash.

2:17Anyway, shall we move on to, you have it highlighted. Did you wanna talk about that one? What do I have highlighted? The new 2025 go-to-market playbook. Yeah, go for it. Okay. So Jason Lemkin posted this and we can, we can choose how we want to adjust this. This is how I want to react to this one. So Jason Lemkin who founded Echo Sign, he has Saster. So the 2021 go-to-market playbook is dead. Almost all of us agree about that, but what has replaced it or will replace it? So he's like, what doesn't work so well today? And this is where we can choose to agree or disagree. So he says, what doesn't work so well today?

2:48Endless outbound emails, low energy digital events, breakup emails, 2021 SEO strategies, 2021 mass scale content strategies, spending all day on LinkedIn, press and basic PR strategies. Do we agree or disagree with any of this before I move on? There's too many to remember when you wrap them all off. What works a little, but not enough to usually be worth it. These are only two. So again, what works a little, but not enough to usually be worth it. Lots of energy into social media and lots of energy into your own pod. So this is where I disagree. I, this is, it takes a very long time to start to compound these things.

3:23Like if you need results like tomorrow or next year, probably don't do this stuff. But since you and I have been playing this game for a while, there is a flywheel where if we put one quarter in, we'll get multiple quarters back. Yeah. So he's saying it works a little, he's saying it works a little, but not enough to usually be worth it. And I think when you look, you look at our social, like there's a nice return. There is the reason I think he says that, because for most people, they haven't built up their social profiles and they put enough years worth of effort into it. So you shouldn't do this in the beginning.

3:48I agree with that part. or if you're putting it at the beginning and you're doing it just be willing to invest years into it before you generate that's a that's a better response yeah yeah um what was the stuff that he's saying doesn't work anymore start off with the first one okay i'll start with this i think the next one's gonna be what still works today but folks often lack the energy to run so um what doesn't work so well today i'll go slow endless outbound emails i agree low energy digital events agree i don't think digital is even as good as in person anymore three breakup emails breakup emails yeah so it's like a breakup email i noticed you were getting chased by a rhino um that's why you have been unable to respond that tells me one thing one you're too busy right now two what like it's it's everyone copied this from sales loft in 2021 no i don't think that works okay 2021 seo strategies yeah that's true 2021 mass scale content strategies spending all day on LinkedIn.

4:42Yeah, I agree with that. Press and basic PR strategies, press and basic PR strategies. We're still seeing a lot of companies do well from just general basic press. Yep. Okay, now let's talk about this is more fun for us. What still works well today, but folks often lack the energy to run. Wait, before you go into that, I'll give you a great example of press. Every time I go overseas, my team sets up tons of press for us to talk to newspapers, magazines, televisions and we get tons of press all over the world that does wonders for our brand so give an example sure i was just in australia uh-huh uh we talked to one of the local newspapers owned by rupert murdoch um they'll do a whole piece on us i talked to i don't know each and every single press organization i talked to i just show up um but we talked to another one and And we went over B2B marketing and what companies can do to adapt.

5:39That went really well. But call it, I did around four or five press events. And when I do press events, these are write-ups for a newspaper or magazine. This time I did not, but sometimes we do television interviews as well at the same time. And it gets our name out there. And we notice in the long run, it helps us get more RFPs and customers. And people then recognize our agency and come to us inbound because they've seen it everywhere. Yep, that's good. All right. Next one is, so I'm going to move to what still works well today, but folks often lack the energy to run. So one, highly targeted outbound that adds real value.

6:16I agree. That works. In fact, we do that with, we do that with Carrot. We create personalized landing pages that are custom to everyone. Well, your customers do that too with your software. Yeah, no. So, but we said, we'll say, Hey, Neil, um, you know, we made this custom landing page for MP digital. So you click on the link and it shows the ad and it shows the customized landing page. Yeah. Um, and so it's like, there's some effort there. Um, number two, high energy IRL. Before you move on, do you want to give example of like, that was a great example of how you do outbound. Do you want to give example how your customers use your software to do outbound?

6:47They don't use it for outbound. They use it right now, primarily in its current state right now. it's personalized LinkedIn ABM ad software. So it personalizes your ads and it personalized the landing page in relation to the ad. Okay. So then no one's using it for outbound, but eventually you're going to add those features. Yeah. Like what we're planning to add is a clay integration where you can just hit, um, you know, add personalized ads, you know, from clay, clay's great for, for outbound emails, right? You can also personalize the messages and all that. So, um, that's another thing. So number two is high energy IRL in real life field events.

7:22connect with prospects and customers' lives. So you and I both love this. Or your own big events, SeaStripe, Figma, et cetera. These two are one and the same. And I think, so Neil's, actually both of us, we like traveling. We like going to these things. I like connecting with people. I like connecting with, especially with great people. Same thing for you. And so these things are always fun because then you can set up dinners and things like that. And those are always memorable to me. And the other thing that I want to call out too, this is a little side quest, with Carrot. So right now we're going to be talking to HubSpot about integration.

7:49We're going to be talking about, I was talking to the lead B2B marketer at Canva. I spoke at an event in Australia, in Sydney, seven years ago, and I hung out with this guy, and we got ramen or something, right? We haven't hung out since, but then we talked about this. It was like we hung out yesterday. Or I spoke at Hong Kong, at a software event in Hong Kong. I hung out with the EMEA HubSpot partnerships leader. He said, oh, okay, you should talk to this person over here. But all these connections come from five, six, seven, ten years ago. they all come from these types of IRL events. And the people that keep pushing, those are the ones that are constantly going to be around your orbit.

8:26Same thing in Vegas. This past two days ago, I hung out with a guy that we know. He runs a laundry brand now. He used to run a software company. They're crushing it now, right? Then there's another guy. I didn't see him for seven years. Last time I saw him was on a cruise ship for someone at sea. But my point is, these things all compound over time, and you shouldn't expect to get an ROI immediately. same thing for customers too sometimes it takes five to seven years maybe not that long but still a couple years to get there yeah yeah okay weekly webinars yeah visiting prospects and customers in person which kind of go hand in hand with the events yeah aggressive brand awareness whatever that means yeah just getting your brand out there aggressively doing partnerships yeah incredibly high quality video content about industry and not you so i would use this as an example we're talking we're not really talking about ourselves we do try to share some stories but we do try to just teach people yeah yep so point is i would say the trend with all these on what works today there's a lot of in-person stuff man like you would talk ai all day but this isn't gonna go away no this is not gonna go away yeah and you mentioned some as see what the heck happened to that conference they're still around i mean i remember oh so the first time i went to that this is 2016 This is immediately right when Trump won the first time, right?

9:44So they changed all the programming, and they're like, oh, my God, we need to mourn, right? So it was like a really sad vibe, but it was still fun. Summit at Sea, they actually ended up buying a bunch of places in Utah, like homes, and then they stopped the – so Summit at Sea is like a cruise conference, like a tech conference on a cruise, right, in Miami. They took it away, and then now it's back. um but you know with like like all these types of events you typically like it's really good in the beginning and i don't know how it's going now but it was fun when i went so yeah and then they bought all this real estate and weren't they selling homes i don't think it i don't think it went well this was in utah i met one of the guys deer valley yeah or not deer valley i think it was close to there something like that something valley and then they tell you how big of a home you can build and all this kind of stuff and yeah i i think that's that's i don't know the founders but that seems like an example where they probably should have just kept focused and it would have been okay like because if you look at web summit for example they've always been the same consistent thing yes and they they do move around to different countries or cities but they're getting paid so i'm assuming it's the same product though yeah they're getting paid by governments right uh-huh yeah because it really helped with tourism like imagine saying we're bringing uh 60 000 people in yeah for hotels and all that people are very flexible oh so you know what they did with summit at sea they made it into a um in-person so they i remember they had it in downtown and And I lived right over it so I could see them running it in downtown.

11:04I'm like, downtown's not a place to run it at. No. But they started making it land-based, and then they brought it back to the sea. I think the sea was a cool concept. It's just not for me. Yeah, it was cool. I mean, the problem with the sea is you're trapped. You can't get off. And then I saw Quentin Tarantino walking around with his bare foot around the boat. I saw Eric Schmidt eating an ice cream cone. And so, yeah, it was a pretty fun experience. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so do you want to pick a next one? All right. I'm loading up the sheet. Let's see. Future of content marketing. Is that you? No, that's you.

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13:55So Tomasz Tonguz, who's a venture capitalist, he talks about this concept of the digital hot dog, marketing in the age of AI. So his question is like, what is the webinar in the age of AI? It's a blog post and a podcast and a video and a meme. So he's basically saying, look, for many webinars, I'll send a note taker in my place, a robot to record a conversation and summarize it in a way that I ask. A personal journalist, in a sense. Instead of watching and listening to the conversation, I'm transmorgifying the subset of the content that matters to me into the format that I prefer. So let's just call transmorgifying it transforming, okay?

14:31He's transforming the subset of content that matters to me in the format that I prefer. A summary and a template, in other words, a blog post. So I think he's saying the future of content marketing now is you're going to be able to transform the content into the form that you prefer. and I think that's largely true because I don't want to spend two hours watching a webinar or one hour watching it. In fact, a lot of blog posts now, I just dump it into notebook LM and then I'm just able to read a little brief and I'm good to go. I got my dopamine hit. I think this is you, Tomas, and certain types of individuals.

15:00Heaton? Yeah, I don't think the majority of people will do this. So let's take a webinar for example. To simplify it, what he's pretty much saying is you're sending AI to take notes for you and summarizing the stuff that's important to you or your business. To your point, it's a lot of work, right? No, it's not a lot of work. People don't learn that way. Some people do. A lot of people need to be there classroom style to learn. I think his point here though, so I agree with his point around, I think you're going to have the option. Like, let's say you attend a webinar, there's going to be a button saying, how would you prefer to receive, what format would you like to receive this content in?

15:38You can choose to stay or not, or you can hit a button. I think that's largely going to happen because you could just convert stuff very quickly in the future. So that's just probably going to become an option that's default for a lot of tools. And I think, you know, you get this optionality with AI. And so. But if you had a guess, because we run webinars and we ask people, why do you think the number one reason people attend a webinar? To learn. Okay. What do you think that, why do you think that they actually like attending themselves? Because a lot of the people who attend our webinar are executives and they could just send their assistant or someone else on their marketing team.

16:13Why do you think that some of these people attend themselves or just have someone else? I think you have to be close to it if you're an executive. Yeah, but it's the same as AI. You can have an AI note taker and have an employee just go and attend and give you the notes back. That's relevant to the business. You can, but I think there are arguments to be in the classroom sometimes because there's a lot more density of information and there's a lot of nuances that you miss. Bingo, so nuances. there's a lot of like edge cases or gray areas that are going to be missed two different people comprehend information in different ways including ai and uh the third one is people have questions when you're there yourself and you're comp you're comprehending the information the way you would versus someone else it creates questions that you have and in a live webinar you can ask the questions and get the answers yeah so i i think the point for me on this one is so i i i think i don't think you're wrong i think the point is there's going to be way more optionality in the future coming because of ai and that's what that's where the future marketing is going to look i think we're just going to see a lot more optionality and you can choose and i think still for me like there's um um you know the the ceo of spacex rights or i think president gwyn gwyn shotwell she's doing a ypo webinar um at 7 a.m like next week or something and i'm going to be there why am I going to be there?

17:34Because I want all the density of the information. And I know if I offload that to somebody else, or if I get the notes, it's not going to be enough. I want to see, I want to get the sense of all the stories too, in that one hour. So, but one interesting that you just mentioned is it's Gwen. And because it's Gwen, you're showing up. I think that's very important to the person doing the webinar. I agree with you. If it's random people doing a webinar and you don't know what they're good at or what they're not good at their expertise, you're less likely to register and even show up. But if it's someone that you respect, like, you know, if Elon or Peter Thiel was doing a webinar tomorrow, I'll be there.

18:11You would be there. And I would be there as well. Yep. Yep. I think it's just, it's, we're just going to see a lot more optionality. And I think that might, that's stuff that we might need to consider as we build more content over time. But when you look at the future of content marketing, I think that's really the key. You need to build a brand so that way people want to read and consume your content in today's world. So I listened to this other podcast with, um, so Mark Zuckerberg was on the Colin and Samir podcast and then Mr. Beast jumped in. Okay. And so the first question when Mr. Beast, he shows up a little late and then Mr.

18:41Beast is like, they ask him like, so Mr. Beast, if you were the CEO of Meta, what would you do? And then Mark Zuckerberg's like intently listening. And then, um, Jimmy, Mr. Beast, he's like, Oh, look, the thing that pisses me off the most is like when I post to YouTube, like I have it dubbed in Portuguese, in Chinese and all these other languages. And it sounds like me, right? I can do that for YouTube and I get 20 million views from Portugal and then 20 million from Spanish. And I just get a lot more views that way. You guys don't have AI dubbing for meta and you guys would help get so many more views that way.

19:11And then Mark Zuckerberg was like, oh yeah, I think we're going to put that on the roadmap for this year. And this actually goes into the content optionality thing where we're going to have to prepare for a lot more options. The other interesting thing, side note, is, you know, have you seen the video where Mr. Beast is running with bags of money? Like it just gets bigger and bigger. It's like, you know,$1,$10,$40, right? The reason he doesn't talk in that one is because the moment he speaks English, they detect it and his view count goes down a lot. That video got 200 million views in this country, 250 in another one, 400 million in another one.

19:40So that's why he didn't talk. And then he's like, Mark, that's why I can't talk in these videos because the moment I do it, they think it's for just English people. And how many people on planet Earth actually speak English, right? That's interesting. It's not the majority of people, I'll tell you how much. No, no, it's not. What is it? I think the number is here. here i'll call it like a billion billion and a half well let me let me grok this let me grok this okay you find the next one i'll grok this all right next topic uh stu or stfu vibe marketing so ft stfu i'll let you guys uh take on the interpretation of that but so again andre carpathy came up with vibe coding which is where um if i wanted to code up a video game using like like Gemini 2.5, which I'll be doing today, you can actually code it in one shot.

20:29I was right, 1.5. 1.5 billion. Okay, yeah, 1.5 billion. Speak English. So how many people do we have in the world? 7 billion, 8 billion or so? So it's not the majority. It's over 8. Yeah. So, okay, going back to vibe coding. So a lot of people now, like, I can vibe code a dashboard if I want. I can just say I want this dashboard. I can vibe code those, like, you know, video game images of me, right? That's not vibe coding. I guess that's vibe designing, okay? So there's this whole Vibe marketing thing. Wait, can you go back and explain what Vibe is? So it's just using these AI tools to code something up by prompting it or using AI tools to code a marketing campaign up if you want to.

21:09It's just doing things. To me, it's just a new way of doing marketing, design, and coding. So you're just doing marketing still, but you're using AI to help you? Correct. And so this is why I know like so and Greg Eisenberg is going to be speaking at the event and then Boring Ads is one of his companies and this is one of his accounts. So vibe marketing isn't some fluffy content. Yes, it is. OK, it's the complete restructuring of how marketing operates. But isn't that just marketing if you're restructuring it? Right. So why do we need to call it something? So he's like, I'm an ads guy. Something that Boring Marketer and Greg Eisenberg have been talking about for some time now caught the attention of big media.

21:44Here's what it means for you running ads. A single marketer with AI tools can now outperform entire agencies. This isn't hype. It's happening now. The old way. Weeks of planning, silo specialists, bloated budgets. The new way. Test dozens of angles in real time. Launch in days. Adapt instantly. You don't need a 10-person team anywhere, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, great. I don't think you're completely wrong, but why do you need to call it something else to make it more complex? It's because people like to just brand things randomly, and I don't like this. It's just like people saying GEO, and I'm like, so you're telling me the concepts for GEO because there's a direct correlation.

22:15of ranking high on Google and getting mentioned by chat GPT and other AI platforms. So you just need to do SEO. Yeah. Yeah. So let's come back. Let's go to that second, but let me finish off the vibe marketing piece. So a couple of weeks ago, I said, Alex Lieberman, who's a friend who founded Morning Brew, he talked about vibe marketing, but it was a completely different context where it's like Elon vibe market. It's and talks, you know, shares his products on X and gets feedback in real time. So that that's just getting feedback. And then this one is you're just doing marketing with new tools.

22:45And then now you have this GEO thing, which you can't actually really do. You're just doing SEO right now. There is no GEO or LLMO right now. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.