SPEAKER_01: 2:08

They shoved most of their budget into performance ads, dropped£30,000 on a single influencer, then sat back in the office waiting for those sign-ups that never came. Today, my guest Andy Lambert, co-founder of Social Media Platform ContentCanal, and now on the Adobe Express product team, breaks down how that happened and what it cost. So, if you've ever watched your paid media efficiency fall off the cliff or run an influencer pilot that barely moves the needle, this episode will help you rebalance brand and demand and build partnerships that actually shift revenue onto your next campaign. I'm Chris Nolan and this is Embracing Marketing Mistakes, where senior marketers turn hard lessons into better campaigns and sharper decisions. Today I'm joined by Andy Lambert, co-founder of Content Camp, which raised over 10 million pounds before being acquired by Adobe. He's also the author of two books on modern B2B marketing. Andy massively overinvested in performance ads. He blew 30k on transactional influencer campaigns that delivered just a handful of sign-ups. And then he had to rebuild growth around community, creators, and a personality-led brand to hopefully get Content Cal to acquisition. We will break down why he misread demand creation versus demand capture, where control slipped with influencers and media spend, and what he now does inside Adobe Express. In this episode, you're going to learn how to stop treating influencers like glorified media buys, how to build a B2B creator ecosystem across six spheres of influence, and what it takes to future-proof your marketing when AI is raising the floor on the content. So let's get into it. Andy Lambert, welcome to the show. Thanks, Chris. Good to be here. Now, um can you tell us about your business that you had and you've sold? Sold to Adobe, right? So do you want to tell us a little bit about what you did, where it came from, what the idea was? If that's all right. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_03: 4:18

So I I was co-founder of it. The uh original idea can be credited to a guy called Alex, my longtime business partner now. Um, Alex had created an agency and has sketched out this idea for a content calendar product to make collaboration between the agency and uh clients better because people were sending content plans on spreadsheets and Google Sheets, etc. So saw an opportunity to productize that. So my background has always been in uh in B2B SaaS. So uh I saw Alex's idea and I thought, hmm, quite fancy that. So I joined him and yeah, together we we grew that business with with other folk, obviously, um, away from just being an agency into being a software business, raised some funding, raised about 10 million uh over the course of the five years that we were we were chipping away at it. And then yeah, five years after uh starting to take content cal very seriously, uh we sold it, which was earlier than we expected, but um we were not going to say no.

SPEAKER_01: 5:29

So you now saw a yacht off the south of France, is that right? Uh not not quite that.

SPEAKER_03: 5:35

Uh there's probably some some stories in uh uh in how much equity you give away uh in that. But never mind, never mind. We live and we learn. But yeah, I I cannot I cannot argue about it.

SPEAKER_01: 5:49

So you didn't have to go up in a lift and Evan Davies wasn't there, and you didn't have to stand in front of Stephen Bartlett and everybody.

SPEAKER_03: 5:55

Ha, no, didn't have to do that. Um we do work very closely with Stephen Bartlett these days, funnily enough, uh, from an Adobe point of view. Um but no, and well, and actually Stephen Bartlett was uh yeah, a long time friend of the business. He joined us on some webinars in the early days, etc. So funny you bring him up because he's been very, very close to to Content Cal. His team all used the product as well. So uh yeah, it's been it's been great seeing his career go uh from strength to strength. So yeah, very cool. But yes, uh, we did not do a Dragon's Day thing. Sometimes it kind of felt like it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:29

I know you got you got his opportunity on Dragon's Den from his podcast, either. You know, that just shows you how a niche podcast can turn into some sort of celebrity. Um anyway, we're not gonna give Stephen Barlett too much airtime. He's got enough, he's all over the bloody internet, he's everywhere, isn't he?

SPEAKER_03: 6:43

Yeah, so uh I'm expecting Chris Norton to be on there on the next ruffler series of Dragon's Den.

SPEAKER_01: 6:49

Do you hear that, Barler? I'm coming for you.

SPEAKER_00: 6:52

So um, Andy, and apologies for my voice again. I've got a bit of a cold in case anyone's wondering why I sound like this. Um so when you sold to Adobe then, did you then stay on um in the business in some capacity, or was it a case of sell the business, start a completely new career, do something completely new?

SPEAKER_03: 7:10

Uh no, so I I'm still here four years post-acquisition. Don't have to be. Um that that part is done. Um but it's just been it's been fascinating to me to work in such a large organization and what I think the 25th uh world's largest company by market cap, which is pretty amazing. Um and what is amazing to me is the amount of stuff that I didn't know in terms of like product development at that scale, decisions you're gonna make, implications. Uh yeah, because you you know, I was first-time founder really. I kind of done one before, but like this is the first one we've taken seriously. You just make it up as you go along, basically. You just use your judgment, luck, chance, bit of graft, uh, a lot of that, uh, to make it happen. And by hook or by crook, it we we got the outcome. But then when you work with some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life, you know, it's quite a humbling experience to be like, okay, there's a huge, huge gap in my knowledge of being a well-rounded business person when you start to work with folk in Silicon Valley. Um, yeah, so I I couldn't not take that opportunity uh to learn from folk like that, because I sure as hell didn't have the qualifications that would get me into Adobe otherwise.

SPEAKER_00: 8:34

And at what point did you're you're also a published author, aren't you? And you've written you've written two books, which we'll talk about later on. So did that come kind of post-acquisition, or is that always something that was bubbling under you know, before we decided to sell?

SPEAKER_01: 8:48

Uh yeah, well you see what Will did there, don't you, Andy? You know, after we had our little chat and he's just frying it up that way. It's quite interesting, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00: 8:56

That's not suspicious.

SPEAKER_03: 8:58

Well very smooth. Um but to to be clear, uh when you say published author, I published it.

SPEAKER_00: 9:06

Ah, yeah, I remember that chat.

SPEAKER_03: 9:08

Yeah, so um let's just be clear about that. It got bestsellers later, so I'll take it. I took a speech bestseller on Amazon. I was like, if it's next to my hero Seth Godin, I'm happy. I'm happy. But um, yeah, it was it was always just one of those things that I was like, I really want to write a book one day for no reason other than the fact I'm like, I wanted to call myself an author. And it just felt like the right time. This was post uh post sale because I had so so much in my mind from doing this in terms of like mental models that I'd come up with. So so yeah, rep wrote one in 2022 just post sale, and uh just wrote another one this year as well. So uh which had been it had taken longer for me to uh to organize my thoughts around this this uh most recent book. So uh yeah, but yeah, it's very fun, very cathartic experience getting out of your head.

SPEAKER_00: 10:05

Yeah, I mean it is it's a fascinating, I mean, I think spheres of influence, particularly. Um we can talk about how many copies that have been downloaded later on. Let's say a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand. It could be anything, couldn't it?

SPEAKER_02: 10:17

I've even checked, to be honest. Yeah, I just put it out there, but yeah, carry on.

SPEAKER_00: 10:21

Yeah, so it's it it kind of talks about um B2B brands leveraging creators and communities and influencers, isn't it? Which which is a really kind of fascinating area because I think when people think about influencer marketing um or um you know community marketing, you you naturally think about consumer brands, don't you? But actually, it's absolutely as applicable for B2B brands as well, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03: 10:47

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I wanted to put like a practical framework behind that because I think influencer marketing, I'm still not sure it's the right term, to be honest, in like B2B, because it seems to conjure up images in people's minds of like, you know, Cristiano Ronaldo or Kylie Jenner or whatever, and it's just you know that kind of B2B slightly icky version of influence where you're just using fame and celebrity to drive reach. B2B is a little more nuanced. Well, it's a lot more nuanced than that, because it's not about necessary scale or total number of followers, etc., or engagement rates. It's about uh a signal of trust, right? Because uh we all have our trusted networks, which is the whole reason of spheres of influence, right? Because we're all influenced by the people that are on our WhatsApp chats, our friends that we meet up in with with communities, or in communities rather. It's all it's in that kind of messy nuance where like subject matter expertise, thought leadership, and influence really happens. So, you know, in B2B, an influencer, you're not buying like reach and distribution, you're you're kind of buying trust, and that's um the most important thing that we're trying to engineer for, um, especially given everything that's happening to marketing distribution of like change in search and AI search, etc. So yeah, it feels like the the timing is right, and there's a lot more narrative about it now, which is good, but I want to write this book to make a bit more practical rather than just like, hey, let's just get our product to some famous people, give them 30 grand and get them to post about it. Because I've done that with ContentCal, and I can tell you, uh, you don't get the return.

SPEAKER_01: 12:37

So can we dive into that, Andy? Because there is so many people, there'll be marketing professionals listening to this now, doing exactly that. We I see briefs for that, or we must see quite over 10 a year. About we've got this budget for influencer marketing, and it doesn't tend to be brand ambassadorship or anything like that. It tends to be um we this is the budget we've got, let's go out to as many influencers as we can. And it it does feel very, very transactional and not what you know, working in PR, the sides of the side of marketing that we come from, it's about relationships, and I suppose that's why media relations, influencer relations, all those sorts of things. I think it's I think it's important to build a relationship with that set of um influencers that you're gonna work with and the r and have a reason for them to have a bloody opinion on what you're doing. So you just said that you had a problem in what you've done. What how can we let's let's go let's dive into that. Where have you gone wrong then in that in that sphere? Sorry to use the the reference to your book that yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 13:42

I mean you said it yourself, Chris, because um I think the the cardinal sin that most people make is that they see it as a transaction and they see it like performance marketing, where it's like, well, here's the value exchange, you've got an audience, I've got money, let's make it happen. You know, that that can you know I'm not saying it can't work, but it's less likely for it to work. And oftentimes, and this is again another cardinal sin. Uh, I see companies say, Oh, let's do a pilot, let's, you know, get 10, 20, 30 grand, whatever the number is, and you know, split it across five influencers and get them to post a bad, you know, our product, service, whatever it is, and let's let's uh analyze the impact in a couple of weeks post that campaign. Most of the times they'll be like, uh, a little bit underwhelming, right? Because you've done you've done two things. One, you've thought that people change perceptions just off the back of one post, right? Trust takes time to build. Just because Chris or Will, you start talking about a widget or a product or whatever, you know, might put it on my radar, be like, ah, never thought about that before. But it doesn't necessarily mean that after one post, I'm going to use it ongoing. Now, if I keep on seeing you, Will or Chris, start to talk about things regularly that's a different thing. Because then I can say, all right, you know, I've started to see how Chris or Will, people I respect, are using this in their workflow. And it now is more contextually relevant to me. So this is bear in mind, like a lot of the lens I talk at this through is is through more kind of complicated tech buying in B2B. Typically, that's the kind of that's the slice of the world that I I typically see and think about the most. So there's so as that point, transaction doesn't happen, you know, process buying process doesn't happen in a vacuum like that. There's other stakeholders to to engage. There's what we call hidden buyers, people that are in the COO or CFO positions that didn't see your posts, but they need to be influenced. Anyway, go on that forever. But anyway, transaction is a problem. Pilot, looking at things in these little pilot, you know, confined things and not stretching out over the longer term, again, problems. And that's what we did with uh one particular influencer where we spent you know 30 grand for them to do a Facebook live tool of their audience. It just basic basically did nothing. And we fell into the usual trap of going, you know, oh great, this would be wick we can be stayed late in the office because this person was based in North America and we're like, I'll watch the sign-ups, come in, lads, and crickets, maybe five, ten signups. We're like, oh. Because we just again misunderstood the difference between demand creation and demand capture, right? We've just started to put this on people's radar, right? We started to create demand. We this is not a transaction. So that's that's the primary issue that we've fallen into. So how do we how do we resolve that? And or how do we think about it better? Um number one, we gotta think about the right value exchange. So, what what do these people do that we're gonna work with over the long term that really make sense for us as a business? So for Content Cal, we spent time working with like agency owners because they were our target audience, so people that also owned agencies that were gonna talk about us on our behalf. And I also made it you know mandatory for anyone that we work with that they have to use the product. If they didn't want to use it, there's no I'd let them use it for free, of course, but they had to use it regularly. Because if these people were just willing to trade their thought leadership just to say, you know, just for a few bucks to talk about Content Cal, that's no good, right? I needed that, and the way I've kind of stressed tested this in my mental model was like, if these people are not advocating for us when we're not watching, then I'm not interested in them being an influencer, right? Because I need, you know, if Chris or Will, you are an influencer for ContentCal, or one of our ambassadors or whatever we call it, um, I want you in your private circles to go, ah, you know what? I genuinely think you should use Content Cal because that's where trust is formed, not just in a singular LinkedIn post. And I think we we miss that as a as a thing. And that also, you know, that doesn't happen in a moment. That means, you know, the effort that I end up going to, that I would spend time with each of those influencers. I don't just send them a brief and go, oh, we've got X grand for you to post about us, or then go meet them, either virtually or face to face, understand what they do, build a relationship, get them bought into the product. Takes a lot longer that way. But then what I want is someone that's gonna work with me over the long term. Because one, they'll advocate for it on their own time, and two, they'll advocate for it over a longer period of time. Because we know decisions in B2B product buying take time. So, anyway, I could go on forever, but hopefully that before.

SPEAKER_00: 18:40

Well, that's yeah, I was I was gonna say, I mean, the the fact that you're you know you gave the example of agency owners, which is quite interesting because they're influential, but they're not influencers, if if you like. They're not famous, but they have within their niche, apart from myself and Chris as well.

SPEAKER_01: 18:56

We weren't invited by Andy to the programme, we were just when I stress that out, it's even part that was. That's true, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 19:03

We were not invited. You picked the right horse there, mate. But so how do we approach um I I guess kind of mapping out, you know, in with my consumer hat on, I know we'd do a period of um influencer mapping, and that would be reading the press, it would be trawling Instagram, speaking to agents. That's not so applicable now, is it? It's about looking at influencers, and you talk about hidden influencers as well, which I find quite interesting. So, how do we kind of find those potentially influential people we can engage with?

SPEAKER_03: 19:32

Nice question. So it starts with the obvious answer, which is where do your audiences spend time? And one of one of the most powerful initial research tools in this space, and again, I I am not an influencer here, but um I like the product and respect him deeply. Uh, Ran Fishkin's SparkToro app is really good for this. So, SparkToro is a place where you can put in, hey, I'm targeting agency owners. Let's go just run with that as an example, and it will then list the the communities and the podcasts uh that agency owners typically frequent. Is the data perfect? No, it's not, but it's a really good start in getting you with a bit of a short list there. So that's kind of that's point one table stakes. And then there's some really easy stuff that just takes time that I just see many marketers not doing. Uh content cow, because maybe it was slightly easier because um we're we're marketing-minded from a leadership point of view, and we also had a sales motion. So I made it mandatory for all the sales team. So for whenever we were closing a deal, they would ask two questions, and it was mandatory for that they put the answers in HubSpot so that we could see how this worked as a macro, so we could see like the deal cycles. The two questions that they needed to ask was uh one, um, how did you hear about us? Simple, right? Everyone asked that question, but it's really important that we we get the quant here because uh HubSpot was always telling us it came through Google, because naturally it's last click attribution where someone's heard about you on a podcast or whatever, and then they Google you, right? So always get the sales team to gut check that. How did you truly hear about us? And the second question is like, who or what influenced you to sign up right now? What was the compelling event that you just see? Did you did you just listen to someone talking about Spark Taro on on Chris's podcast? You know, did you just hear about that? So that is that is the nuance we want. So what I started to see was like regular names appear. So that gave me like the most precious funnel of people I would like go out of my way to build relationships with because they are our true influencers, they're the people that people are listening to. So um that I think that there's just so much gold in that, to be honest, and so many people miss that simple step.

SPEAKER_00: 22:57

And you also um, you know, um so I suppose anyone reviewing your product online, anybody kind. Of spontaneously advocating it. I mean, there's a whole um whole wealth of sources, isn't there? And it's it's it's absolutely kind of resetting how you view influences, isn't it? Because these people might not appear to be um prolific, but actually, if they've got that genuine influence, they're going to have a great, you know, much greater impact.

SPEAKER_03: 23:25

Yeah, absolutely. And like the whole core thesis of of the book is based on this six spheres of influence. So starting from, as you said, uh from the customer advocates to your evangelists to communities to creators to then the kind of more macro personalities slash celebrities, so on your real outside of the tier, your Stephen Bartlett, it's if you will, and then on the farthest outside of that, those six spheres, are your kind of uh what you've class as industry experts. So in tech, they would be, you know, your analysts and researchers in like Forrester or Gartner or people like that, you know, the the ones that have not macro influence, right? But they're the ones that have influence in the boardrooms. So but if you activate all those six spheres from like, yeah, getting customers to love you first, finding to your point, Will, those evangelists that are naturally talking about it because some people just want to advocate for products. Like, I advocate for Spark Toro because I really like the the notion, the ambition of it. Um, and then obviously communities was a huge piece for us as well. Um, many businesses sleep on communities because, again, it's hard to research, takes a lot of time, you know. But uh the impact that uh the marketing meetup community had for Content Cal. So a marketing meetup, I think it was what, 45,000, 50,000 marketers. It's quite big in the UK, starting to gain some presence in the US. But notice that that group was uh, you know, I attended a couple of events in person. I was like looking around, I was like, most of these people in here are our ICP. So, you know, again, just having your ear to the ground in your market, tight knowledge or it all starts really a tight ICP because I was like, you know, agency owners, you know, uh it was so it was so tight that initial ICP that it became a lot easier to then figure out where they hung out. Because it's then easy just to ask fellow agency owners, like I know Chris, you know, where do you get your information from? And then once you do, once you understand that, then you'll find those communities to to spend time in. And you know, the more often you sharp there, the the bigger influence you would drive. Anyway, long narrative, six spheres. Um, that's the kind of nuance of broader category of like influencer marketing in B2B.

SPEAKER_01: 25:49

And you'd you've used brand building a lot in the sale as well. So I know it's one of the reasons I found you is that you you've got like 25,000 followers on LinkedIn, you do a lot of personal like videos where you're talking about and you'll break down the news from social media or whatever it is that week, won't you? But you make it quite personal. Do you want to explain how you've used utilised that? And was that was that key as part of the getting the interest from Adobe, or was it was it just something that you found you were getting more views and engagement for on your LinkedIn and etc.

SPEAKER_03: 26:23

I think it all I doubt it was key for for Adobe. There's there's too many other interdependent factors. Uh whilst I'd love to say everyone post on LinkedIn because you'll get bought by Adobe for some nine-figure acquisition. That would be nice, but I'm not sure I could say that with uh all good confidence. But um, and I think I might have shared this with you in our kind of previous call as well, Chris, that um there is such a wonderful halo effect to doing stuff personally on LinkedIn. The most memorable asset and the best thing that you have is like a as a smaller brand, someone that's kind of challenging the existing category and fighting against bigger competitors. The most memorable thing you have are the people within your organization, because people will remember a name better than they will a logo or what you say or anything like that, right? So, and again, that really helped because of uh a few things. One, because uh we pivoted from a very performance-dominated uh marketing strategy and budget, where 90% of all of our marketing budget went to performance channels, right? Because I think we all know how that story ends. Over fixated on performance marketing, um, basically living and dying by our weekly um efficiency, you know, the cost of acquiring customers versus lifetime values, always just overfixating on that. And our performance channels did not scale as we started to raise capital for the business. Because as you know, you know, professional marketers, performance marketing channels don't scale linearly when you just pile on more budget. Doesn't mean you're gonna suddenly if you do 10x the budget, doesn't mean you're immediately gonna 10x the amount of customers you went off the back of it.

SPEAKER_01: 28:18

You'd be amazed at how many people are listening to this now thinking, doesn't it? And yeah, it sounds obvious, but I bet you there's a lot of people who've never had the budget to be able to go, actually, if my boss just gave me another, well, three times the budget, because we get, you know, cost per acquisition is 20 quid. So if we had another 10,000 quid, we could do so much more, but it doesn't work that way, does it? And that's how you found out the hard way. It doesn't.

SPEAKER_03: 28:42

You just get efficiency breaks down, uh, costs continue to rise. Um, and not to say it's impossible to scale. And I think there's there's other teams that were better at performance marketing than than we were, better creatively, um, will be better targeting, etc. So, you know, I'm a sample size of one. But it is, it's just not a linear thing, right? And that's that's the problem. And I think it's it represents the lack of maturity that we had as like first-time founding team, where we misunderstood the relationship between demand creation and demand capture, right? We had overfixated on demand capture and underfixated on demand creation, which kind of leads back to the whole question around brand that you're asking, Chris. So that then led us to pivot our strategy. We didn't come we didn't remove all budget from uh performance, obviously, but started to rebalance it between brand and demand. And again, brand marketing often gets a bit of a bad rep because it's like like C-suites, see it as like, oh, we're just gonna put our name on a flyer. It's like kind of nice to have frilly stuff running outside, which we all know is BS, right? But I think marketers could do a better job at like articulating what does what does good quality brand marketing look like and what does the impact of it? To break it down for what for what we did. So one part was like this whole personality-driven growth thing where we all started activating our kind of personal brands. The the CEO and me as as co-founder did did a lot there. Again, the Halo effect was super impactful for two reasons. One, whenever I walk into a sales meeting, people would typically look at me and go, Oh, I think I recognize you, you're the guy that does the roundups on on LinkedIn. At that point, I know I've won the deal, right? Because already they're gonna be the one remembering me after I've left the meeting, right? So already we're giving our product uh an unfavorable head start, you know, um, because they already have feel like they have a connection and they know me. There's already that the modicum of trust that exists. So that's incredibly powerful. And two, uh, we really doubled down on webinars. So, you know, that's not a an exciting new channel, but what we wanted to do was like create like the best in-class um webinars for social media strategy, the best speakers that we could get. Some we would pay, you know. So again, this links to like our influencer stuff. Some uh we wouldn't pay, you know, that but the halo effect we got from that was significant. So, head of social at Monzo, Stephen Bartlett being on one of them, a whole raft of people that are deeply respected. Not most of them weren't customers, but it's really interesting because when you're putting on such you know great speakers, great content, really actual advice from people that are truly respected in the space, it gives your brand it's such a halo of halo effect around your brand because people assimilate, oh wow, Content Cal's being used by Stephen Bartlett, by Innocent Smoothies, by Monzo. It's like, and some of them were, but not all of them. But because we're kind of hosting them, you know, create that mental model and the connection between people like how the hell content cow's onto something big.

SPEAKER_00: 32:05

So uh that let's dive into on to webinars a little bit. And um, I've got a selfish reason for asking these questions as well.

SPEAKER_01: 32:12

Is that because we've got a webinar early next year that we could do with Adobe appearing on?

SPEAKER_00: 32:17

Um, but I'm I'm intrigued because I mean, from our perspective, post-pandemic, all of our kind of IRL events went online, turned to webinars, and you know, I think most other companies also looked at webinars. You know, we've we've got longevity and when it comes to webinars, and I think we've outlasted quite a lot of other competitors potentially. But there's an awful lot of webinars, is what I'm saying. So are you saying you kind of doubling down and improving the quality? Was it just getting amazing guests, or did you do other sort of strategies and tactics to make your webinars stand out?

SPEAKER_03: 32:52

Great question. I think, yeah, for sure, uh there was there was favorable timing. There was definitely that, right? Because we're talking when we really started doubling down middle of 2020, uh, all the way through 21, right? So perfect time for for webinars. That being said, you know, I still do them today at Adobe. Of course, I don't really talk about this because everyone's like, oh, it's Adobe, so you get a load of people. But we still have like 1,500, 2,000 people turn up live. So, you know, there the demand is there if you've got like a good message market fit. Do we do anything special? I don't think so. Um clip done there.

SPEAKER_01: 33:34

That's it.

SPEAKER_03: 33:38

Yeah, I mean, high quality speakers, good engaged email list. Um and I think by having a lot of the like this is gonna I want this to sound uh sound without I want to phrase this without making me sound like an egotistical uh idiot. But because I fronted a lot of this up, you know, writing the emails, doing the LinkedIn, it just it all built around that whole kind of broader Bram narrative. There was that kind of connective tissue of like people felt like they could also talk to me, so I'd get loads of questions after the back of it, like, oh, that was really interesting. What's your advice for doing XYZ? I respond to absolutely everything. You know, you end up drowning in like DMs, but it builds such goodwill around the business where you're just known for doing like high-quality webinars, high quality advice, and just you're the social media strategy guys. And because we were so tight on what we wanted to be known for, again, that's a really important question that anyone needs to ask themselves and align around when you're going after these content-driven initiatives. It's like, what do you want to be known for? Pick one thing. Don't say five, because that's what most people do. Like, do one. Who is your ICP? Get tight. Don't say multiple, get super tight on them, and get super tight on if that's your target audience, where are you going to find them? Again, this talks to my webinar promotion because commute like seeding in communities, not just dropping links for promo sakes, but because you built the relationships, you've done your groundwork of like, here's the people that are influential in our space, and be like, hey, guess what, guys? We got another webinar coming up. We've got Stephen Bartlett or head of Social Innocent. I would love for you to come along. It doesn't feel promotional because you've been there before, right? It's not like you're turning up for the first time, just like link spamming. So because you we built that that model and that engine, if it was something that was sustainable. But basically, it's like growing a flywheel around a business, and it's just not something that you you just turn on. Hey, we'll do webinars, bang out a link on LinkedIn, and then people go, Oh, webinars didn't really work for me.

SPEAKER_01: 35:51

It's like you get out what you put in, basically. That's what people do with videos, isn't it? We wanted we did a video, it didn't work. They're like, what sort of video? What was it targeting? What was it about? You know, like there's a million different types of video you could do, a million different types of channel and content, and yeah, it's the same to yeah, I know what you mean. It's one of the reasons we started the podcast, actually, is to meet interesting people that work in marketing and and kick continual professional development and to meet yeah, other people in this and it has it has worked out that way. But I tell you what, it's a slog. You have to put you have to put this put the reps in, don't you, to do to achieve anything in any sort of form of B2B brand marketing.

SPEAKER_03: 36:30

Yeah, and that's that is the hardest thing, that's the biggest blocker because I'm also a realist, even though I've I'm slightly cynical sometimes with like you know uh made some joke over my marketing colleagues here, but like the real the day-to-day pressures are real, and I do get it. Like you're always battling like short-termist thinking, trying to prove ROI. It's a it's hard, and I don't actually have a a silver bullet to solve that one, too. But all of the best initiatives, it always feels like uh like you've got some magic strategy or something incredible happened, but it's it's really just a combination of doing a sensible set of actions over a sustained period of time. What most good stuff comes down to.

SPEAKER_01: 37:17

It's com it's compounded, isn't it? Basically, the like the re the reps of whatever types of marketing it is. I mean, brand, the more you do it, it it compounds, it's not just like you've done it twice, it's compounded. Those twice that twice becomes like the equ the power of five. It's really, really weird to measure. That's exactly it.

SPEAKER_00: 37:37

So um you you you talk about kind of personal branding, and I'm a I'm a big believer in the the importance. I mean, I think that's one of the big growth areas in B2B thought leadership, isn't it? The the kind of the individual personal branding. Does that kind of cross over to how you would market the brand? So, you know, is it the same thing? You know, would would you as individuals all have your own personal brands, and that doesn't cross over into how the brand markets itself on LinkedIn, for example, or are the two the same thing?

SPEAKER_03: 38:07

Honestly, I think it's it's kind of one and the same. Um and yeah, I'm no trained brand marketer, so again, this is open to interpretation. So it's fair to say this is my view of the world, isn't necessarily the view of the world. Um, but an example I'll point to is uh a video, uh a meeting notes software company called TLDV. Um they had a very smart approach to how they do LinkedIn and and well branding across all social channels. Yet it feels slightly more unhinged than their website. Their website's still very like uh casual, laid back, um conversational because they know their target audience, which are kind of people like us, basically. So we don't necessarily need like corporate blues and crap like that. We just need human language. So they they do whilst they do understand it, but it's slightly toned down. But the thing that's so amazing that they've done on LinkedIn, as you can see, and they've they've proven the thesis that LinkedIn company pages are dead entirely wrong, right? So uh if you do LinkedIn well, company pages are great too. They've also done a lot on their own personal brands. But the thing that TLDV did very well, and again, this goes back to a different mindset when we're working with creators, they hired creators, they found people that were talking that kind of language to their target audience, so we're appealing, they predominantly market to um product folk, right, like myself. So so they're big in that space again, tight E I C P. And they they looked on on TikTok predominantly as to who are the creators that are talking about like that just got like real fun, slightly uh excuse my language, piss-taking uh narratives for like for PMs, just you know, uh work-oriented but kind of satirical, which which everyone loves, right? It's kind of entertainment-oriented content. So they actually started by uh testing those creators. Let's do a couple of briefs together because it worked quite well, they just hired them. So if anyone looks at TLDV, you'll see some regular faces and personalities that represent that brand. And that brand on social isn't really TLDV, it's those characters that exist. Right, interesting. So, um, and that then gives them a really interesting differentiated position on social. Um, so yeah, I think it's times are a changing here, and that obviously will give brand managers some sleepless nights, I think. Um would that work for a business like Adobe? I'm not sure. Um, but uh it just goes to show this is where I think there is, you know, small to mid-sized companies have a real strategic advantage here.

SPEAKER_00: 41:09

Hmm. And it's great to see, quite honestly, you know, real kind of radical thinking and creativity within those B2B fields. I mean, it started happening a few years ago, didn't it? And people realize that actually you don't need to publish a dry white paper on LinkedIn and then get some um business people in suits talking about it. You can actually be a be better than that, and you can be more creative than that. Um and it's great to see um all these brands embracing that.

SPEAKER_03: 41:36

Definitely, definitely. And it's and it's working at uh like at the the fastest growing brand level. You look at someone like Clay, for example, again, you know, they're publishing their CFO and CEO, having an open dialogue. This is a really good post on LinkedIn, but it's just like um fly on the wall um video about the CEO and CFO debating whether they should sponsor the Super Bowl or not. You know, and this is one of the fastest growing B2B brands of all time from a revenue point of view. And just a pretty kind of lo-fi recorded conversation because they know their audience. They know that monsters are constantly battling that ROI thing. So having a fly-on-the-wall combo between a CEO and a CFO, you know, that's that's mana from heaven. Like, no wonder it got that much engagement. Again, it's just knowing your audience, uh, understanding their pain points.

SPEAKER_00: 42:32

And that's exactly it, isn't it? It's such a such a kind of intuitive understanding of the audience, and it's just brilliant, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03: 42:39

Exactly. Just a little creative approach to it. Do something a bit different, like, hey, what if we tried this? And it's like a screw it, let's do it attitude, and I I love it.

SPEAKER_01: 42:50

Yeah. Um you so would you say that the um the the marketing mistake that you've shared today, then about the under investment, well, the over investment in um in in enhanced for the you're talking about lineal growth. Is that is that the big mis mistake that you could share on this part do you think that the the I mean it sounds like a big learning because you've you've had a decent budget to spend behind that and then you've seen it not work. How how haven't you is or is is there something else you want to share as well?

SPEAKER_03: 43:20

No that yeah basically that um that plus the uh waste is 30 grand with that singular influencer which where we started the conversation basically we started the conversation talking about my multiple F ups as it relates to spending on the marketing budget. Yeah um but yeah you live and you learn so hopefully people won't have to make those mistakes again they will though they will everybody every everybody makes the lineal oh if I keep spending this I'm gonna get this out and it doesn't work that that engine doesn't work that way like yeah then a million a million dollars later you realise um perhaps it's not gonna work yeah um so what what what are you doing these days then in in Adobe you you you've got quite an interesting job title what what does that mean that you do day to day now at Adobe uh product strategy product development uh all related to uh a product called Adobe Express so um less hands on with with marketing these days although I constantly annoy our marketing teams with uh ideas and suggestions um so yeah it's a it's a little bit different um to to what I've done in the in the past but like I said it's I'm always I'm really interested like how from like a career point of view like you can have well-rounded experiences because I think like the ability to of a marketer to become like a generalist I think is a really important skill um because especially as uh as whilst marketing budgets grow marketing headcounts don't seem to be typically and I think we're we're now getting past the time where marketers uh will be allowed to hey I'll get an engineer to work on this or outsource their their thinking and I don't think agency budgets are necessarily going to grow in line with that which is a challenge sometimes. I'm interested in your take too but um you know I've been I've been both reading and writing about the concept of like the gen marketer which both relates to you know the understanding of of gen AI right beyond writing captions or copy uh like how do we truly understand gen AI and agentic workflows and we're still fairly early so it's okay if like you know everyone everyone feels behind with gen AI I think it's everyone's in that constant state of mind of like it's overwhelming so much change etc but I think it's very important for marketers really to to start thinking in terms of uh of workflows and thinking in like their systems thinking is something that that needed to level up and I I identify that as a as a problem that well not problem but a gap that I had in my own kind of self-development wasn't a very good systems thinker now you know working in products at such a you know ridiculously big uh and fast moving organization systems thinking implications etc you know you've got to be a lot smarter with some of your critical thinkings that so that's been good um so I think again very long-winded answer but importance of very important for like marketers to to experience you know or kind of or form a well-rounded view of the world uh level up their capabilities in in Gen A I obviously and you know the ability and I think this is quite interesting because we spent the last 10 years creating content which is fine but uh I think increasingly we're gonna be about like for marketers are going to be about creating experiences. So create a little micro site or landing page or little experience or like a little kind of you know you know scorecard or checker like that these kind of little micro experiences we used to have to rely on engineers to build and have that as a gated environment now with tools like Lovable or Replit or Cursor or whatever our chosen flavor is, you know we can code up things in a couple of days that anyone can do provided they they've got an interesting view of the world and thing and see the gaps in their target audience that they could easily serve. Like to give you an example I know it's a kind of long narrative like we put so much effort in like ranking number one for SEO for content calendar and we just had like this you know and we we got to number one or two for for that search term and um the the kind of main uh asset there was a Google Sheet template of a content calendar. But like now these days I I would be totally approaching that completely differently. I would be creating like an interactive content calendar full of ideas coded on lovable of which anyone can use and like trial some form of content cow light experience which I could then gate once they've done enough things in the product to then go, huh, why don't you try the full version here? You know and I could do that as a marketer. You know I'm not a developer. I'm technically minded but I'm not a developer. So um I've always had to rely on dev teams to build experiences like that. So it's really empowering for us as marketers to be systems thinkers, to think more broadly and to think in terms of experiences not just content is my takeaway.

SPEAKER_01: 48:44

Yeah because I mean Adobe leading the way in in a generative AI and we said this on our chat didn't we and I was I was basically I I heard that you had the the big conference in the US and a lot of people I heard a lot of people talking about it and the fact that the the generative side of it is really exciting that in the way that you can make multiple types of paid all your creative you could have hundreds of thousands of types of personalized person and this is this is the era that we're in. We're in the era of personalization because we've talked about personalization for bloody donkeys years in marketing but now it's actually possible you can personalize personalize your content down to the molecular level can't you and Adobe are leading the way in that so and I'm not I've not been paid for this message just to be clear but I've heard it and these is you you're getting you're getting your message out there.

SPEAKER_03: 49:34

Did you go to that conference or did or have you did what did you what was your takeaway from it yeah good question um yeah it's it's a massive conference it's called Adobe Max in um in uh Los Angeles so it's pretty cool. We'll take a couple of tickets for the podcast next year too yeah all right cool we'll come and report on it well funnily enough like this year was the first year we uh brought 300 influencers we'll ship them out all right okay laid on a dedicated experience again you know whilst it's not directly related it's again that point about marketers should be creating experiences not just you know we didn't just give these 300 creators like here post about Adobe Express we're like you know what we'll I appreciate I'm talking a massive business level so not everyone can do this but you know we can we then invested in those 300 creators bring them out to Adobe Max LA put them up etc give them a really cool experience laid on all of this experiential stuff and other like creators that they could learn from and the net result with that was you know a huge amount of content that would end up getting created not by us but through all these people that are attending creating like a groundswell which meant lots of people started hearing about us. Again just goes to show like you know Adobe's also been on a journey with how to work with creators and the broader creator economy. So it's it's happening at all levels and you know and it's okay we might be here on a journey but we we want to get to like that Adobe level and there is a path to get there which I try and lay out in the book. So anyway my takeaway was that like you know creators were you know real at the really at the core of of what we were doing and bringing them into the Adobe ecosystem. And two was you know the amount that we are doing by baking in like Adobe experiences into like third party products so being able to create directly inside of ChatGPT for example if you're you know prompting something and you want to design you know you can just call the Adobe Express app and it will mock up a design for you which is incredible. We launched a whole bunch of like agentic and assistant based workflows which were really cool. Again unlocking the thing that we you know it's still not perfect right let me let me be clear there's there's still a way to go but we now are at a point where we have this isn't dreamland stuff where we can put in a put in a prompt and get a a series of uh incredibly well created content as uh off the back as a result rather than like oh well there's a load of stuff but can I use it? We're now at the point of like it's of genuine utility. So yeah I it felt like the the gen AI promise had very much arrived to be honest.

SPEAKER_01: 52:32

Yeah because that the other side of that is are we uh which is a post that I haven't done on LinkedIn but I are we in the era of AI sloptimization which is basically just sl AI slop everywhere. Just let's slop it about let's just get a quick prompt to write a post on LinkedIn about marketing because I'm not very creative. Here you go have this put five emoticons and a few m-dashes in although I've heard that chat GPT's now removed m dashes if you ask it actually does that so for all you out there writing your LinkedIn post on that you can it does actually now remove it. So is it are we in the era of beige marketing that AI is doing or is it is it going to just go is it going to get so good that we're like okay shit we need to worry about our jobs because that that it seems to be too I don't know what social media is like you go on TikTok it's like AI is brilliant. It's gonna change our life we're all gonna be playing paddle all day and we're not gonna be working or the other side of it AI is going to have taken all our jobs we're gonna be unemployed and and it's gonna nuke us all this it seems to be nowhere in in between.

SPEAKER_00: 53:38

Yeah and specifically for designers what does that mean you know that the stuff you're talking about has that got created yeah to to to work out creatives or will it evolve the way creatives work?

SPEAKER_03: 53:51

Truth answer I I don't know I will have I have some theories on this that as well this is some club yeah um but I think it's yeah I'm old enough and bold enough now to realise that uh you know I whilst I have opinions they are not facts there's a difference between my opinion and fact um but what we're what we're seeing is like uh both uh a a raising of the floor which means like crap content won't really exist like really bad content won't exist because why would it? Because Genai is is so darn good like uh Google Gemini 3 dropped last week which is unbelievably good right so there's a huge amount of power in that I'm currently stress testing that to make some infographics off the back of my LinkedIn post because infographics have been really hard to do it it's better better than I've anything else I saw some examples of that it does look good. Yeah still I'm still not 100% okay with it but it's definitely in the right direction because like visual representations of mental models is really is a real powerful like thought leadership tool so I'm really keen to dive into that so I think yeah incredible opportunity it's you know raise the floor okay uh but it's also raised the ceiling simultaneously is because you know good quality like the content that's really going to cut through it's it doesn't necessarily have to be you know surprising anymore because it's gonna be very hard to surprise people right like a gorilla walking through a forest singing on a skateboard or whatever. You can do it all like you can do it all which is fine. But I think my kind of more optimistic view of the world is that you know personalities will continue to come to the fore and I'm thinking from my lens of of of B2B I think it makes this kind of stuff even more valuable. When I say this kind of stuff I mean podcasts I mean all the stuff that we've been talking about because yeah great for ads no no doubt performance based ads are going to need to happen. So there's lots of ways to use generative AI to build ads to target people. If you're Coke for example I know we're talking about B2B but if you're Coke and you want to translate your ads and have 700 different variations for Black Friday crack on because you now can have yeah and it can all be perfectly trained in your own custom model all commercially safe absolute mana from heaven for for performance marketers. But you know taking it back into like more kind of small to mid-sized business, B2B marketing, you know, again there's it's just more nuanced than it's this or that because you know both things are true at the same time. Like let's take the example of a business like Clay, great B2B software, right? They'll have a component of their performance marketing which they will have used Genai to help them uh create a whole batch load of content which they're testing the variables and variations across multiple channels or they'll have created numerous thumbnails for YouTube and testing 30 different thumbnail variations. All of that stuff we know is good practice but us as marketers never had the time to do it. So it's a brilliant unlock for um like the operating piece behind content. We often think about Gen AI in the context of just generating content but actually gen AI to underpin the like the operations of content to optimizing content. You know that's just good stuff. Humans don't want to do that right and this especially as it gets smarter and it like automatically optimizes off the back of hey this did well we're gonna serve this ad more no one wants to pour over spreadsheets that's not fun human labour right machines can lay but then you've got the other side you know let's say kind of Clay have got their self-optimizing um uh like Gen AI performance marketing uh motion going but they're also now turning to LinkedIn with the CEO and CFO having a fly on the wall lo-fi conversation because they know that that kind of deeper long form conversation more deep human engagement that we're having on this podcast today is is and probably will become even more important.

SPEAKER_01: 58:16

So yeah a a bit of both really it's not either or but I love the message the message Andy is is B2B the future of B2B marketing is is personalities and is brand it is brand we've I've been saying this for like the last sort of six months it it is which is why we started the podcast two and a half years ago it's brand it's personality and you you know you've built you've built and sold a business off the back of it you know and bloody Bartlett's beating us down in fact I think we should create a at the end of this podcast I'm gonna email Stephen Bartlett and say we've created a drinking game called the Stephen Bartlett drinking game.

SPEAKER_00: 58:51

You have to drink a shot every time you hear the name Steven Bartler during this podcast um okay you you I mean I could talk to you all day this is great because I mean we future of B2B marketing is something we're really really interested in and it's it's hard to pin down what it is but I think you've articulated it really really well and it's yeah fascinating chat.

SPEAKER_01: 59:14

That's that's Will's lead in to get you to come to feature on our future of B2B marketing webinar later next year.

SPEAKER_00: 59:20

No that's my lead to get an invite to the LA conference next year.

SPEAKER_01: 59:23

Oh yeah I was more of a as once you started talking about experiences I was just talking about free tickets I'm well up for this this experience anyway let's get it done yeah well we haven't got an app we haven't got a sponsor for the show yet we should we've just never get around to doing that.

SPEAKER_03: 59:37

Anyway um what I wasn't applauded by the way I was such a play that was a play and uh anyway um you've been on the show now um and you you've you've got to share your knowledge and your fuck-ups if you were us who's the next guest that you'd have on this show and why there are I'm gonna name two um because they're perfect one's a perfect build on like the more data driven thesis of what I've been talking about which is Kate Newstead from LinkedIn uh she spoke at my um recent B2B forum event which um a couple of weeks ago so Kate Newstead she's yeah unreal speaker uh and where's she from Harry? Where does she work? Uh LinkedIn. Okay oh wow okay yeah that and she's she's brilliant um and where does she work LinkedIn I thought you meant she was on LinkedIn not at LinkedIn uh yeah so uh she is the Amia lead for the B2B institute so they do all the kind of research and it's a basic LinkedIn think tank which is wicked so perfect. I mean I nerd out over that stuff all the time and then uh the other is um Lisa Vecchio V-E-C-C-I-O who is um head of marketing at uh VED which are one of my favorite like B2B brands fast growing and perfect build on what I've what I've been showing they're like content cow um if we had carried on growing um yeah they have they haven't sold they just carried on growing increasingly pushed uh a lot of their you know split their budget between brand and demand loads of influences load of like in-person activation big focus on brand um both brand from a personality perspective and brand from like a more traditional like you know uh eye-catching colours you will find no blue anywhere near V'ede um so yeah both of those are standout individuals doing standout things brilliant okay no suggestions what I'm gonna do now is it's talking about I'm gonna clip when you mention our names and then clip that bit on the end two standout individuals the power of editing yeah thanks for coming on the show that was great Andy thank you for that if people want to find you where where can they where can they find you?

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:57

Which is pretty obvious where they can find you isn't it LinkedIn funnily enough yeah see you there