Website Expert: These Mistakes will Make or Break Your Entire 2026

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Trends

Episode: Website Expert: These Mistakes will Make or Break Your Entire 2026

Host: Stephanie Postles
Guest: Josh Koenig, Co-founder & SVP of Marketing, Pantheon
Date: January 7, 2026

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Overview

In this insightful episode, Stephanie Postles sits down with Josh Koenig to discuss the rapidly-shifting landscape of websites, digital marketing, and the technological and cultural trends that are shaping 2026 and beyond. The conversation spans the changing expectations of web visitors, the impact of AI and LLMs on search, collaboration between marketing and IT, rising technical expectations for marketers, and the UX details that can make or break growth. Josh draws on Pantheon’s position in the market—powering mission-critical websites for major brands—to distill actionable insights and subtle industry shifts that many teams overlook.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Critical Importance of First Impressions in Website Experience

• Josh Koenig highlights a crucial, under-discussed factor: delivering a high-quality initial website experience is vital. If pages don’t load almost instantly, users—particularly those on mobile—will bounce before the page even finishes loading.
  • "People don't really think of the fact that they're visiting a website as anything different from they tapped on their phone and loaded an app. That's the baseline of experience people expect." (Josh, 00:16)
  • "One of the things we can observe in our data is the number of clicks that don't even wait for a page to fully load. They tap, they get bored and they just swipe left and move away." (Josh, 00:42)

Speed Benchmarks

• Josh’s "magic numbers" for load speed:
  • Over 2 seconds: “You're done” (users leave)
  • Under 1 second: “Good” (best practice today)
  • "You're done at like two seconds. And good is under one second. It's a change. Expectations are changing." (Josh, 06:27)

The Unprecedented Impact of AI “Crawlers” and LLMs on Website Load

• AI models and LLMs (Large Language Models) are fundamentally reshaping web traffic patterns, especially for sites breaking news or delivering time-sensitive info.
  • "The speed and intensity with which all the crawlers come in on fight night... It's almost like a denial of service attack." (Josh, 08:18)
• This requires robust site infrastructure, but Josh stresses the underlying best practices remain: scalability, clear information architecture, and anticipating “agent” access as much as human.

Evergreen Website Strategies for 2026

When asked for a “top five” list of strategies for future-proofed websites, Josh outlined:

1. FAQs / Questions & Answers Format
   Anticipate and directly answer questions on your site. It's beneficial for both human visitors and LLMs.

2. Technical SEO & Semantic Marking
   Use established markup formats for metadata (maps, images, addresses, hours) in your code, not just for SEO, but for LLM readability.

3. Monitor & Engage on Third-Party Forums
   Forums like Reddit are essential, as LLMs pull info from there. Influence your reputation and accuracy where possible.

4. Consistent, Distinct Brand Voice
   Ensure your site's language represents your brand in every context.

5. Gating Content (With Care)
   Decide thoughtfully what’s public or gated. Gated content won’t be accessible to LLMs/bots or show up in rich search results.

   • "If you do the fundamentals really well...you have to do all the things, you need to do them at a high quality and you need to do them consistently. And that was always true. So it's just like, hey, marketing, let's do our job." (Josh, 15:30)

Avoiding Artificial or Over-Engineered Tactics

• Josh is skeptical about artificially adapting (e.g., making a second “clean” site just for LLMs to crawl, or rewriting all content as Q&A for bots). Instead, focus on core quality and authentic value.
  • "If your website is so gunked up it needs a special LLM.txt version, why wouldn’t people want the cleaned-up version, too?" (Josh, 19:04)
  • "We walked back from trying to literally rewrite whole pieces of content to be read as an interview or a Q and A form, because again, it didn't feel authentic." (Josh, 20:05)

Lessons from Failed Content Strategies

• Josh shares a candid lesson: producing “medium quality” SEO content without true subject-matter expertise resulted in generic, unhelpful content that later polluted their own AI-powered search results.
  • “What you produce starts getting really generic and starts to feel like it’s a roundup of other articles that are also written for SEO. … It was really skewing the results … so we had to … weight [actual documentation] higher.” (Josh, 21:24)

New Tools: Integrating Content Creation & Publishing

• Josh introduces Pantheon Content Publisher, designed to eliminate the classic cut-and-paste workflow between writers and web teams by integrating Google Docs and real-time preview with web publishing.
  • "People don't sit down and crack open their CMS to create content ... making content teams and web teams actual partners and collaborators versus silos." (Josh, 26:36)

Building Effective Marketing & IT (CMO-CTO) Partnerships

• The web has shifted from a static IT asset to a living marketing channel that must be agile and secure. Successful companies align these imperatives—speed and innovation versus compliance and stability.
  • "This is one of the most critical partnerships ... Without the ability to fully flex what you are doing digitally ... it's very, very hard to be an effective marketer." (Josh, 32:43)
• Best practices for brokering this partnership:
  • Acknowledge and respect each other's goals.
  • Tie both teams to shared KPIs centered around growth/business value.
  • Decide collaboratively which responsibilities live with IT, which with marketing, and set guardrails as needed.
  • "I've seen this ... many times, and it really does unlocks the magic. People are not only more productive, they're happier." (Josh, 35:46)

The Rising Technical Bar for Marketers (“Vibe Coding”)

• Marketers now have “no-code/low-code” tools and AI (“vibe coding”) to rapidly prototype, build, and iterate on apps and campaigns without IT.
  • "It's incredible for prototyping... Even if at the end...it's only treated as an example." (Josh, 44:30)
  • "I think the profession is just going to become more technical over time because so many more of these things are technology mediated and we want to be masters of that." (Josh, 53:25)
• Josh details how tools like Next.js let developers pick up, verify, and refine code after an initial “vibe built” prototype, bridging between speedy iteration and organizational rigor.

The Entrepreneurial Marketer Mindset

• Marketers increasingly function as “intrapreneurs”: building, testing, analyzing, and iterating just like startup founders. This is now table stakes for the role, whereas previously it was niche.
  • "Good marketing has always been like that ... The entrepreneurial mindset is a tremendous asset ... I also think it's fun." (Josh, 54:38)
  • "If you're not fluent in those things (digital/tech), how do you even do your job?" (Josh, 57:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On User Expectations:
  "You're done at like two seconds. And good is under one second." (Josh, 06:27)

• On AI Crawlers:
  "It's almost like a denial of service attack … more intense activity from those sources than from casual visitors." (Josh, 08:18)

• On Content Quality:
  "If you do the fundamentals really well... you have to do all the things, at a high quality ... and that was always true." (Josh, 15:30)

• On CMO-CTO Partnerships:
  "Neither of us will be able to be successful on our own terms." (Josh, 34:45)

• On Technical Skills for Marketers:
  "I think the profession is just going to become more technical over time ... it's going to become increasingly data informed..." (Josh, 53:25)

• Lightning Round Highlights:

  • Favorite guilty metric: “Topline website traffic.” (Josh, 59:00)
  • Smallest UX quality he refuses to compromise on: “When the website loads that it doesn't keep jiggling around as other things pop in.” (Josh, 60:57)
  • Walkout song for CMO/CTO duo: “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place.” (Josh, 60:24)

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Key Timestamps

• Initial Website Experience & "Swipe Left" Culture: 00:00–00:48
• The Baseline for Web Speed: 06:22–07:19
• AI/LLM Crawler Overload: 07:35–09:45
• Evergreen Website Practices for LLMs & Search: 13:11–16:04
• Danger of Chasing Microtrends: 09:45–12:29
• Pitfalls of Artificial Tactics for LLMs: 19:05–21:16
• Real-World Content Strategy Mistakes: 21:24–23:10
• New Workflow: Google Docs to Web Publishing: 26:36–32:16
• CMO-CTO Collaboration (and Tensions): 32:16–40:57
• Rise of No-code/Vibe Coding: 44:30–50:17
• Lightning Round (Fun moments): 58:09–62:44

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Style & Tone

The conversation is candid, energetic, and deeply practical. Josh is technical yet down-to-earth, frequently mixing real data with practical advice and the occasional self-deprecating “marketers admitting their mistakes is not something that happens that often”. Stephanie keeps things lively and grounded with relatable questions, humor, and summarized recaps to clarify insights.

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Summary Takeaway

To succeed in the evolving digital landscape of 2026, marketers must prioritize ultra-fast, first-class digital experiences, stay grounded in fundamentals that also serve modern AI needs, build authentic content, and champion closer partnerships with IT leadership. The era of highly technical, entrepreneurial marketers is now—and as the technical bar rises, so too does the importance of creativity, agility, and staying “dangerously good” at the basics.

Transcript

[A]

There's a lot of discourse right now about how AI and LLMs are changing search as a source. The thing that we see in our data is just how vital it is to deliver that high quality initial experience. The web is the place where you get to show up and you actually own the experience for the visitor. But the other piece of this is that when those clicks come in, if you're not able to quickly deliver the experience that a visitor wants, more and more traffic is coming off of mobile devices. People don't really think of the fact that they're visiting a website as anything different from they tapped on their phone and they loaded an app. That's the baseline of experience that people expect. And one of the things that we can observe in our data is the number of clicks that don't even wait for a page to fully load. They tap, they get bored and they just swipe left and move away.

[B]

That's me. So what is that magic number where it's like, if you're over this, you're done, you'll get swiped on?

[A]

I think like, you're done at like and good is under. Expectations are changing and on a phone people just want things, they expect it to move faster and there's no reason it can't. Like, that's the really important thing to note for people. If you're doing it right, you can totally meet these expectations.

[B]

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends. I'm your Host Stephanie Postols, CEO and founder of Mission.org and today I'm excited because we have Josh Koenig joining the show. He's the co founder and SVP of marketing at Pantheon. Josh, welcome.

[A]

Hey, thanks to be here. Thanks for having me here, Stephanie.

[B]

Yeah, I'm really excited to have you here. I'd like to level set because we don't oftentimes have co founders who are also leading marketing. And so I'd love to hear first, what is Pantheon and a bit about your journey of, you know, how you created this company?

[A]

Sure, absolutely. So Pantheon is the Internet's leading website operations platform. And that means we help professional teams run their websites, reach their audience and evolve those websites going forward. We're used by tens of thousands of pro teams and the sites on our platform collectively reach over a billion unique monthly visitors. So it's a big Internet platform and we started it 15 years ago. It was based on my co founders and I all having this professional experience of doing this work, being on these teams and realizing that the process for building, launching and then modifying and maintaining websites was just deeply broken and we came up with a better process as consultants. But it's very slow to change the industry one project at a time. We thought we had an opportunity to build a platform that would turn what we were doing in that consultancy into a service. And the rest was, you know, there's a lot of things between then and now, but. But it's been very successful and we're really excited to help continue this mission that we have of changing the way people work and ultimately making the web as a channel and a medium much more impactful for organizations and for the people working on it to be much happier doing the work that they do.

[B]

Yep. Amazing. I mean, can you just name drop some of the brands that use Pantheon just so you can flex a little bit? I mean, you have a lot of companies using this.

[A]

Yeah. So like people, when I, you know, when I explain this to folks, they say, oh, you like Squarespace or wix? And the answer is, I mean, a little bit, kind of. But we are focused on larger organizations. So we work with, you know, eight out of eight of the Ivy League universities, we work with global brands like Nest, Clorox, we work with mission driven organizations like the ACLU, Easterseals, we work with B2B SaaS, companies like Tableau Software and others. So it's really across the board where the needs of the organization and the teams behind it are not going to be satisfied by those really cool. And frankly, improving the quality of websites, consumer grade tools. We try to bring that value to the enterprise.

[B]

Amazing. Okay, so a couple things I know we're going to get into in this episode. We're going to be talking about the CTO and CMO collaboration. We're going to talk about AI search and the, the things that you're seeing that most people might not even be seeing right now. But before all of that, I actually just want a high level question asking about, I mean, you can see into all the data because of all these websites, because of everyone, all these brands that you're helping. And I want to actually hear from you, like, what is something that no one's talking about that's like silently killing growth, that these brands are coming to you. They've got all these websites and things happening and you're seeing a trend that most companies just aren't realizing right now.

[A]

I think there's a lot of discourse right now about how AI and LLMs are changing search as a source. So I don't really. We'll get into that later. That's not really all that unknown. I think, though, the thing that we see in our data is just how vital it is to deliver that high quality initial experience. Because the number of clicks you get into your property, like the web, is the place where you get to show up and you actually own the experience for the visitor. The number of clicks is definitely getting harder because the paid channels are always shifting around what they can deliver, and organic is definitely changing. But the other piece of this is that when those clicks come in, if you're not able to quickly deliver the experience that a visitor wants, the baseline for this is now set. Because more and more traffic is coming off of mobile devices. People don't really think of the fact that they're visiting a website as anything different from they tapped on their phone and they loaded an app. That's the baseline of experience that people expect. And one of the things that we can observe in our data is the number of clicks that don't even wait for a page to fully load. Right. Like where people, like, they tap, they get even slightly bored and they just swipe left and move away. I mean, that's all of us. I do it too, right? And the thing is, you can literally see it in the data because we sit in the middle of the click stream for everyone. So we. You can see stuff that even Google Analytics can't. We haven't productized that yet, which I really think we should, but we've done studies on it. And you can just see there's a very clear signal of when the initial request comes in saying, hey, I'd like to see this website. But none of the other things attached to that page load. And that means someone requested the website but then didn't actually load it. They swiped away.

[B]

Okay, so what is that magic number where it's like, if you're over this, you're done. You'll get swiped on.

[A]

Yeah, I think the done. You're done at like two seconds. And good is under one second. And that's a change. Like it used to be people would say, like, one second is like best in class. And if you're over five, then you know, people. And I think just expectations are changing. Like, a lot of those stats that are out there were made in an era when most people were sitting in front of a computer or in front of a laptop and they're, I don't know, they're just more patient in that mode or the, the, you know, deep in their brain, their expectations are different. And on a phone, people just want things they Expect it to move faster and there's no reason it can't. Like that's the really, the really important thing to note for people. If you're doing it right, you can totally meet these expectations, but doing it right isn't a given. And so we like to help people make sure they get there.

[B]

Yep. Okay, so speed still matters. What other data do you have that like you said, maybe you could productize, but what do you have that maybe people who are running all the Google Analytics and all the software is showing them how their website's doing, what do you see that you know they probably can't get right now, along with the.

[A]

Speed piece, the other thing that is really interesting and this gets to that question of how LLMs and AI is changing search, but I mean, there's a lot of discourse around what that means from a user experience standpoint. People are still trying to figure out what it means from what your website is expected to deliver to this new non human audience. And the truth is we've been optimizing our website for robots for a long time because search engine optimization is just that. But this is a totally new iteration on that practice. And one of the things that it's really interesting to see is just how much consumption of your website is driven by the crawling from the major model makers, because they all are. We have a customer that I think I can reference this customer, UFC.com, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and the speed and intensity with which all the crawlers come in on fight night because they're all racing to. Being able to answer the question of who won is. It's almost like a denial of service attack. They swarm that website and they try to crush it beyond. It's actually there's more intense activity from those sources than there is from casual visitors browsing to the website to try to see it at that point in time. It's really interesting to see those patterns and you can see the ebbs and flows and surges of this agent driven. It's not from people asking the agent, it's from them trying to pre crawl so they can answer the question 90 seconds later.

[B]

It's a very interesting visual thinking about all of them flooding a website and a website being like, wow, how do I handle this? I mean, that's a very different era we're in now. And we're just jumping right into the AI piece because now we're going there as well. But how should we be thinking about building, knowing this is a new level of complexity that maybe websites have not been built for this level of aggression coming at them all at once to find answers.

[A]

Yeah, it's a really interesting thing, especially for anybody who thinks about having websites that break news or delete deliver time sensitive information. I can't talk about any brands in this regard, but I have worked on projects where they're releasing market moving material information like investor relations and stuff like that. That's always been something people were cognizant of. But again, to this point the intensity of it has gone up. And I think the truth is that there's not really something you need to do differently to build your website to specifically withstand being swarmed by AI crawlers versus being able to withstand having something go crazy viral on social media. At the end of the day, it's a lot of people wanting to or a lot of things wanting to read or consume the content off of your site in a pretty short amount of time. And the patterns for being able to have a website that stands up to that are pretty well established. And again, that's just when I talk about we wanted to build this stuff into our platform that we learned as consultants. That's one of the key things that we help people with. But I think there's a lot that's beyond that that goes into how do you even structure the information on your website so that it can meet the needs of a direct visitor, but also meet the needs of thinking of the LLM almost like a research assistant. Someone's going to think about it this way. Someone's going to send their intern to your website to figure out the answer to a question. How do you target the way everything is structured so that it's very easy for that research assistant type of Persona if you want to personify the LLM to learn what they need to learn? We're still in the early days of figuring this out. And to be honest, the other thing that's true about this is that what's happening with the models is constantly evolving. Something someone said to me really recently, which I thought was a little bit wise, is it's probably risky to try to chase every micro trend that's occurring in AI right now because they move and cycle so quickly. You don't know whether there's going to be longevity in this, but there are underlying things that are definitely true that you probably should have been doing all along. Like people are going to have questions about you. You should acknowledge that and have answers to their questions readily available directly in that format on your website. That's something that humans like when they encounter it. And it's also something that the models can pick up and more easily digest. For instance.

[B]

Okay, so this would be an interesting one to dive into and get like a best of list because I think you're uniquely positioned to answer this. I remember when we talked a while back, you were like, by the time people started talking about AI and LLMs are searching for answers, you're like, our customers had already been doing that for a long time. Like, we have customers that are really far ahead because they're more technical. They were already asking ChatGPT for the answers. They were already doing it in different places. So I think it's. You're in an interesting space that's kind of ahead of where other companies are. So if you were to say five things right now, like five things that you should be thinking about. One, putting questions on your website, you should have always been doing that still matters. Like, what are five evergreen things that marketers should be doing when it, when it comes to their website?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think we, we, you know, speaking with my marketing hat on, you know, for Pantheon, because we are trying to reach this pretty technical audience. You know, you look at the demographic breakdowns of like, I think like broadly speaking, it seems like people like to engage with chat as a way or ask as a way to discover content. But it's really clear that our target audience is all in on this and has been for a while. So we've been thinking about this deeply. So yes, making information available in question answer format if you aren't already doing it. And I won't go into the details of this, but the technical side of SEO, where you are labeling the content on your website in a way that defines. This is a map, this is an image, this is our address, these are our hours. There are commonly established formats for how to provide that meta information on the website that doesn't show up to a person. It's all in the code of the website, but it is currently used by Google to produce those rich overviews. But the LLMs know how to read it and it really matters because it gives them context. Another thing is to looking outside of your website in the same spirit of questions and answers. Obviously these LLMs are going crazy on Reddit, so you have to pay attention to how you're showing up on Reddit and be engaged there. But beyond Reddit, other reviews forum question and answer websites, you just have to. You can't control what's going on there, but you need to really try to pay attention to it and influence it. You know, another piece would be thinking about, you know, the way that you show up, the way the language on your website shows up in different contexts, like the strength and clarity of the brand voice. That's something that can carry through or not in terms of how you're represented. And then, you know, honestly, just making sure that more of your materials. The pendulum always swings back and forth on this in marketing. But how much do you make publicly available versus how much do you gate? Because you want to gate some things, because that's a way to signal deeper engagement with an audience and there's lead capture opportunities, obviously. But if it's gated, then it's not going to be available to be indexed. What's funny about all these things is that none of these are like new. These are like. That's what I think is kind of the. There's a silver lining in all of this to me, which is if you do the fundamentals really well, then, you know, it's not like one weird trick to get the LLMs to rank you highly. It's actually, no, you have to do all the things, you need to do them at a high quality and you need to do them consistently. And that was always true. So it's just like, hey, marketing, let's do our job.

[B]

Yep, yep, there you go. Okay. Simple as that. Interview done. So, okay, you were saying that it's, you're cautious to bet on, you know, how fast these LLMs are changing. The rules are different, what's being pulled and crawled and what's not is different. But are like, is there anything right now that you're like, this might not work out, but I am betting on that because I still think you're a good person to place interesting bets. You've been doing it this whole time since creating Pantheon. Like, I'm sure you're placing bets right now.

[A]

Yeah, fair point. I think the question of how far you lean into any of these tactics is one for people to consider to the point where paying attention to how you show up on Reddit, people should do that. If your audience is on Reddit, which there's a lot of things on Reddit, so your audience is probably there to some degree. For us, we're not yet not making the bet to treat that like a community the same way we treat our internal community forums. But we've talked about that. What if we tried to actually take more of what we're doing in community and actually push it out into these other third party external places? That's like more work, it requires a bigger investment of energy in some ways there's some risks associated with it because again, that's a forum you're not in control of. But I think that we're going to make some investments along those lines. Similarly, like how much we do a lot with G2. They're a great vendor I'm sure many of your audience works with, but there's a plethora of others. And do we want to put on the radar, put in our budget and our plan for next year that we're going to try to actually run the board with all of these review sites and make sure that we're optimizing for all of them. And those are ones where I've not like made the bet, but those are ones where I'm like seriously considering because again, I think those are things that are, they're good for the current environment where we are thinking about how we show up in ChatGPT, but they're also just good for the business. I'm reluctant to anytime someone comes to me with a thing that is only for it feels like it's artificial for chat, I have a little pause on that. Just in the same way that I don't love the idea of doing things that are only for SEO, like if it's not something that is authentically useful and valuable, I definitely want to think twice or thrice before doing that.

[B]

Yep. I mean, I think that's a good life lesson in general. But what would be. Just to make sure, what's a good example of something that's artificially being created just for chat? Because I've heard things that. For example, I've had someone come on here before and say you need to create essentially two websites, one for the LLMs to crawl, one for for people to look at. And to me I'm like, well, maybe that is an artificial thing that you don't need both. But then I'm also like, I don't know, maybe you do. So tell me some artificial examples.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. There's the idea of having a clean version of your website that is easy to crawl. And I'm sure that in some circumstances where you feel like your website today is like you, the question I ask is, well, why wouldn't the people also like the cleaned up version of the website? I think people get stuck in this world where their ability to make progress and improve the core quality of the main actually existing website feels like it's very limited. And then you do start to think about, well, we have to greenfield Build something new for the agents. Because the main thing is just like, like, we're stuck with this kind of ugh, thing that is not very good. Our world is the main thing should be really good. But for people who just, for whatever reason aren't in that space, that is something that a lot of people talk about, like having the LLM txt, like just the text, just the language part to be consumed by the models. Because what's being delivered to the rest of the Internet is so, you know, gunked up, it's difficult for them to parse. I mean, I would say again, in a perfect world, you don't have to do that, but I see why people do get stuck in that. Another one that we looked at and did a bit of, but I think we're walking back on is like, maybe like too much leaning into reformatting content in question and answer forms. Like, is. It seems like maybe it gets picked up a little bit better, but then when you look at it as a regular human reader, it feels just odd that it's not. There are certain content that actually does lend itself to being authentically structured that way, and you should totally do that. And if there's a way to put a frequently asked questions block at the bottom of every article, totally do that. But I think we walked back from trying to literally rewrite whole pieces of content to be read as an interview or a Q and A form, because again, it didn't feel authentic.

[B]

Yep, yep, that's good. I'm sure there's a lot of things that people jumped at quickly that they're like, oh, okay, too much now that just doesn't even look good anymore and no one wants to read it.

[A]

Well, it's the same thing. And I'll cop to this. Like, I. This is, you know, marketers admitting their mistakes is not something that happens that often. But I had, you know, we had a situation where we were building articles that were. They were intended for SEO purposes. That was their primary purpose, but we had an internal goal that they would still be really authentically useful in some cases. I think we fell short of that goal because we were trying to cover a lot of broad content and we didn't have all the subject matter expertise in house. Then what happens with that sort of operation? You're trying to produce content in pretty good volume. You don't have subject matter experts. What you produce starts getting really generic and starts to feel like it's a roundup of other articles that are also written for SEO. And the negative consequence that I saw from that was we did a project to try to we're doing a project right now actually to work on improving the content search experience using AI for ourselves. And we found that when we indexed everything that kind of medium quality content was really skewing the results that we were getting from the search on the first pass. And so we had to take some, take some effort efforts to tweak and tune how we were treating content and pull in our actual product documentation and weight that higher so that that would be more likely to be filtered into the answers and they would become more specific and more on point with what our perspective or what Pantheon can do versus these sort of general industry overview pieces that do exist within our content hierarchy.

[B]

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[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that the key when this works and where I've been proud of some of stuff that we've produced that was again, the original inception of a content piece was we have a gap in this from an SEO perspective. It's when we were able to bring something authentically, uniquely valuable to that subject versus rehashing what has already been said many other places. I think to your point, that idea of being able to speak to a whole buying committee or to educate the broader market about something that is new and different, it is more challenging because you're trying to talk about your product or service, which even if it's not technical, it might just be for a specific industry or a specific use case. There are experts on that that are going to get it in a way that the Procurement officer never will. And yet you have to be able to figure out how to do something that conveys the value through to that audience. That's that and educating the broader market. It's like the Mark Twain thing. I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one. It's actually very hard to make things succinc and distinctly meaningful versus like boiling it down and making it really generic.

[B]

Yep, yep. So now that we're on the topic of content, I want to hear about. I was on your website and I saw at the very top content publisher and I want to hear more about this because when I saw this, I'm like, I feel like this is every marketer's dream content like creator. This is what everyone's wanted. So tell me about what is this and where did this idea come from?

[A]

So we, I started working on what we're now calling Pantheon Content Publisher for Google Docs. It's the first step in a journey. But we started working on this a little over a year ago and it was again born from what we saw now, not with our consultancy, because we're running a platform, but within a lot of our customers and in a lot of our digital agency partners who are big users of Pantheon. And what we said, what we saw led us to conclude, let's all just admit what we know is true, which is people don't sit down and crack open their CMS to create content. Right. There are probably some places where that's true. But by and large, that content creation, the ideation, the collaboration, the editorial internal review process, that's all happening probably in one of these document cloud productivity suites that are very good for doing this stuff. And we're a Google shop, we know that not everyone is, but we started there because that's kind of of what we knew. And we knew it was pretty broadly popular and they have great tools. And so the challenge we set ourselves with is can we eliminate, metaphorically speaking, the work that always happens where someone has to copy and paste from the document into the web publishing software, whatever that is, and make that a fully integrated process? And the answer is yes. And it's actually kind of exciting no. Because what you get with this is the ability for content teams and web teams to actually be partners and collaborators versus silos, where you're kind of throwing something over the wall, filing a ticket, sending an email with an attachment or a link or something to get the work done. Because what happens when you have that air gap in the process is then, number one, it's not efficient because there's a whole lot of rework that happens for the web team when they have to massage the content into the CMS or the publishing platform. And then inevitably there's this question of like, okay, now which is the source of truth, which is the official document if we have to make a change? And I don't know how it is in your world, but in mine, oftentimes you get feedback from stakeholders after something is published because they don't get a chance to look at it first. And it's just this frustrating frictiony cycle of figuring out where you make those tweaks and how you reflect them back and who then has to reapprove, whatever, all those things. So the content publisher is just, let's make that a fully integrated process. Google Docs has a nice little add ons marketplace. So we built an add on for Google Docs. You authorize it into the content publisher platform. The web team has to do a little work to make it work to publish the website, obviously, but you can get started in a playground and just see how it works. And the neat thing is, not only does it fully eliminate that copy and paste air gap and all that rework, it also creates the ability to have real time preview on the website. So real time collaboration inside Google Docs is a great thing for teams as you're working, especially teams that have to work remotely. It's a great way to be productive. It's also really cool to be able to have a link that everyone can look at that shows you what will this be like if we hit publish and then to have it actually update in real time when you're workshopping the headline to make sure that it doesn't wrap over three lines or whatever. That just brings this idea of real time collaboration into the content team, web team partnership. And that helps to make things a lot better because making these partnerships inside organizations really effective. You can have the best technology in the world. And if you don't have good organizational alignment and partnership, it's pretty hard to get great results.

[B]

Yep, yep. I mean I love this, this tool because it feels like you all are really, really getting to like, first principles of like, what are our customers struggling with? And like getting in their mindset of like, what are they copying and pasting multiple times? How are they not able to collaborate with their different team members? Like, I love this. And I can also see a whole suite of tools like this where you're like, okay, eliminate all these extra steps and let's just make, you know, it be seamless between it and marketing and sales and just make it easy when it comes to like this website. So I love this. I'm excited to see where it goes.

[A]

Yeah, like I said, it's the first step we have. We have grand visions for what this means from a design standpoint. There's a whole world of you've got all these assets, images, documents and so forth. That's part of the vision too for how do we make all the, our perspective, which is this is the important, I think, difference from a lot of others that are working in this space. We're not trying to replace any of these other tools that the teams currently love using. What we're trying to do is make those tools effectively integrate together. So there's a little bit of Pantheon in there. We're just the glue, we're just the orchestration layer and people don't have to, we don't try to convince people to quit using Google Docs and start using some other cloud editor in order to be a part of this process. And by the way, the first feedback we got from a bunch of people was, well, we have to use Microsoft and it turns out we'll be able to do the same thing with the Microsoft tool suite too. But that's very much the vision. We want to meet these other practitioners where they are in their tools of choice, unless they hate their tools, in which case that's a different conversation. But I think most people who use Google Docs, they like it. People use Microsoft Office. It's like pretty good and it works for them. Designers like to work in Figma, like all these, like, we're not going to replace any of these Tools, but we can make them play nicer together.

[B]

Yep. So exciting. Well, now that we're talking about different orgs coming together, I really wanted to talk with you about creating a nice relationship between marketing and IT and tech, like the CMO and the cto. Friends, how do we make this work? Because I know you have a lot of opinions of like, why this is a very powerful relationship to forge between the CMO and the cto. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on like first, why is this important to think about as a marketer?

[A]

Well, I think the, I mean this is one of the most critical partnerships for an organization overall to get right and for marketing to be successful. Because the reality is without the ability to fully flex what you are doing digitally and that has to include the part of the journey that you own, which is going to in most cases be a web based journey, without the ability to fully flex that muscle and make it work the way you need to on your schedule, on your timeline, it's very, very hard to be an effective marketer. Now this has been true for years, but especially now more than ever. And the, one of the interesting things about our business and what we see is, and it's a challenge too, is that everybody's already got something. You've already got the web as a channel, you've already got a website or maybe even websites, like a portfolio of stuff that's out there. And a lot of it is from a prior era or it has roots in an earlier time when it was more static, when it was more of like, well, the job is just to have it be there and be stable and safe and secure. And that's all we need. And so that's all that was built for. And if you think about the incentives of an IT organization when they have non negotiable imperatives around that kind of security, compliance, stability stuff. And so a lot of organizations historically really struggled to figure out how to fit together those IT imperatives with the need of a marketing organization to be able to move fast, react to changes in the market. And in many cases that partnership, partnership turned sour at a certain point. So I think if you're in a situation where you feel like you don't have a great partnership, or if you're coming in and there's a new year coming in fresh or someone else is coming in fresh on the other side, it's always a good time to say, hey, we got to work together to meet the needs of the business. Neither of us will be able to be Successful on our own terms. Because if we just lock everything down and keep it staggered and keep it ensconced in protective wrapping but unchanging in order to make sure that one team's needs are met, the business is not going to get what it needs from that asset. On the flip side, if you have a world where things are going willy nilly and some of those IT requirements aren't being met, then obviously you have a huge problem. There's a huge amount of risk there. But the good news is you can make this partnership work. There are good ways to get alignment between a CMO and a CTO or CIO on what are we trying to achieve for the business now, what does that mean for me as an organization and me as an organization lead? And how do we divide these responsibilities up so that we're working together versus across purposes? I've seen this, like, again, this is something we facilitate with our platform and I've seen it work inside many of our customer organizations. And it really does unlocks the magic. And people are not only more productive, but they're so much happier when they have an aligned partnership versus, you know, constantly kind of bickering over the website.

[B]

Yep. Okay, so I'm imagining, I mean, how do you, how do you broker this behind the scenes and how do you have, like, as a marketer, how do you show, like, these are my goals and speak in a way that also the, you know, the tech team is going to be like, okay, that makes sense. I know how to help you and you need to help me in this way. Like, what are best practices with brokering this relationship?

[A]

So I think one thing that is important to start with is not just bringing your goals to the table and being clear about them. Start by acknowledging that the other team has their goals and that those goals are valid. This is like a really basic human thing, but saying, hey, I understand friendship 101. I understand that, like, hey, you're under a lot of pressure and this is really tough. And I agree that your goals are very important and I'm thinking about your needs and taking them seriously when I'm thinking about my plans starting there. And then the other piece is to establish that the goals that are maybe more on the marketing side of the house around, we're trying to achieve results, we're trying to drive growth, we're trying to build our audience, we're trying to drive more pipeline, whatever it is. You have to figure out exactly what that is and how that resonates within the business. But make sure that you actually have buy in on those goals from a lot of different stakeholders. Because a world where you're just a service organization and people are coming to you with like, hey, can you fix this? Can you update that? And you just are going to drown in inbound requests from stakeholders that are trying to fix something that they see as wrong or achieve do something that they think will be neat on the Internet. And there's lots of things that should be fixed and there's lots of things that are neat. But if you understand I have to prioritize what's going to help us achieve our mission and this is how the digital channel that we own contributes to that mission, everything gets a lot easier then it should. If they're enlightened enough or even they're listening and you've established a little bit of a connective channel, they'll say, yeah, it's important for us that we do create growth in the company. We want that to happen because things are much more exciting in it if we're driving more growth. Hey, how can we help you do this? That is there something we could be doing that would assist with creating growth? And then you can start to like, that's the basis with which you can start to build a partnership. And then the good news is there's lots of ways if you set things up responsibly for both teams to get everything they want.

[B]

Yep. Yeah. So it sounds like too you're looking at high level company goals first and showing, hey, we're both plugged in to this same goal. Like, let's also take ownership in this one goal together, like you said, driving certain growth, hitting a certain amount of customers and, and partnering in that way where you have a shared KPI that you both feel like you're the hero in that KPI and you both can come together to make it happen in some way. Is that kind of what I'm hearing?

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And what I will also say, I've seen it work out in a number of different ways. There are organizations where IT and marketing really do collaborate quite closely. They share goals. Because in organizations where IT is still going to own all the technical resources, they're going to have resources there that are going to be hopefully aligned with marketing and they're going to have shared KPIs or tiger team style shared goals. There are other cases where what it does is they say, we want to set you up for success. We want to establish some guidelines and some guardrails, but let you make more of the decisions and own More of the execution. In that case, it is functioning more as a productive business partner. But they're letting the marketing organization become more technical themselves and take ownership over the channel. Both of those flavors can absolutely work, and it just depends on some, on the size of the organization and the maturity of both departments and where their priorities are at. But it can be either like a really close collaboration or a business partnership where there's just a clear division of responsibilities and everyone's getting what they want.

[B]

Want. Yep. Yeah, sorry. A clear. A thing that I've heard on the show so far is that marketing is also being like forced to get more technical with, you know, Vibe coding tools and everything they have access to now. And they're kind of like merging into the IT world more and more. Which I'm wondering how you feel about that. Like, what's a good way showing, like I'm now doing things that you used to do, like creating apps really quickly and doing stuff. Stuff like it seems like a tricky space to figure out who owns what. At least the space that we're in now with. Yeah. How many more technical tools and capabilities marketers have that maybe a couple years ago they were still asking it to do for them.

[A]

Yeah, I think like that's where the, that kind of ongoing dialogue is super important. And like Vibe coding is like a great example because, you know, it used to be that like, I mean, this is still not entirely new. Right. It used to be that you could, the marketing would just hire an external agency and they would whip something up really quick, quickly, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. A lot of the question is how good was your process for managing that kind of work and that kind of collaboration and the ongoing responsibilities of maintaining it if it has a longer life than just being for a time bound campaign with Vibe coding that's just made that all the more easy to effectively have a similar process. One, because agencies are all using these tools too, so they can do more work faster for less budget. But also like anybody could try Vibe coding and you don't have to be a software engineer to get pretty far. And I think the question is going to be again, figuring out how to set up the framework and the guardrails of what you work on, what IT works on, what are the standards we agree to. Hopefully you have an IT organization that recognizes that they want to be high velocity. That should be a goal of theirs. But to do so safely, you got to move fast without breaking things. And there's ways of managing this across a number of platforms where, if marketing wants to, they can be innovative and try experiments and do things pretty rapidly at low cost without necessarily having to engage resources from it. But they're managing that work and there's some oversight and some governance so that it's not just throwing a bunch of random stuff out there and it's meeting the organization standards that they need to meet. Again, aligning on what those things are, what's the framework that gives you the freedom you need to operate? That's the really key thing to figure out.

[B]

Have you ever wished that your entire video production workflow lived in one place? Well, you're in luck, because that is ltx, the creative suite that was built by Light tricks, all for AI video production. It takes you from idea to final 4K video all in one workspace. And under the hood, you've got LTX, the next generation creative engine, powering native 4K synchronized audio and cinematic quality fast. So if you make content professionally, this isn't just another tool. This is your new creative home. Go explore it at LTX Studio. Have you ever wished that your entire video production workflow lived in one place? Well, you're in luck because that is ltx, the creative suite that was built by Light tricks, all for AI video production. It takes you from idea to final 4K video all in one workspace. And under the hood you've got LTX2, the next generation creative engine, powering native 4K synchronized audio and cinematic quality fast. So if you make content professionally, this isn't just another tool. This is your new creative home. Go explore it at LTX Studio. Deal. Okay, so you just mentioned vibe coding, which is a space that I'm like, loving. I've already created a couple apps. It's really fun seeing how quickly you can do things and how quickly you can get to like the last 99% and be like, dang it, I don't know how to get stripe working. Dang, I don't know how to get this other thing working. But still fun. So I'd love to hear from you, like, what are you seeing in this world of vibe coding right now?

[A]

Well, so the, the way that vibe coding is starting to play out, you know, one of the things, and everybody knows this, but it's worth acknowledging, it's incredible for prototyping, the ability to quickly get something up and running that communicates the idea of what the application could be so that you can get consensus around that. That truly revolutionizes the process of building these things. Even if at the end of the Day. The Vibe coded artifact is something that is only treated as an example if people aren't using in that context today. You should just start because like you said, it's a lot of fun and it can provide lots value when it comes to actually getting from Vibe Coded to production. There are new technologies for building software experiences that are emerging. Sometimes they're whole platforms like lovable. But there's also these rising open source frameworks. For instance Next js, which is just the fastest growing framework for building interactive software grade experiences on the web. We're just about to launch a beta for support for Next js. I think it's this important because what we talked about before, the expectation for users is web experiences are app grade because it's on my phone, I just tapped a thing, a window popped up. I'm not thinking, oh, it's a website. Let me give it an extra five seconds to load. It's like, no, I want it to feel like I'm still in the app. And Next JS isn't the only way to do that. But it's like there's a convergence of next gen development work being done around that and it's a great, great platform for Vibe coding in.

[B]

Okay, help me get there of. I understand lovable because I built apps in there. Explain to me what Next js, how do I think about that?

[A]

So you think of it this way. What? Next JS is an open source framework for building applications that you can deploy on the web or on your phone if you wanted to. But let's just say for the web, because it's open source, at the end of your Vibe coding process, a developer can pick it up and do that last 1% if they need to. They can tweak things, they can fit and finish. Now there's lots of if thens. In certain cases, the output of the Vibe coded stuff is impossible for a human to read because it's all gobbledygook. But that's actually getting to be more and more normal. You see people whose jobs are now like I kind of do cleanup on Vibe Coded projects and what they're doing is kind of that last 1 to 2% or whatever. I ask the prompt five times to move the button over there and it's always getting it in the wrong place. Let me just have someone do that. That's possible. When you Vibe code on top of an open source project. Next JS is just not the only one, but it's the fastest growing one that offers this capability. The other thing it lets you do to get back to it's imperatives is that once you're actually taking the real software output of the Vibe coding platform form and then inspecting it and auditing it and making sure that it doesn't pose any risk to the organization and you sort of can track it, then it becomes a lot. People feel a lot safer deploying it versus just treating it as a prototype. This is where the cutting edge of the technology really is. Because the key things are getting the output of your Vibe coding process to be clean and human readable enough for a developer to pick it up and take it that last mile. And then also the quality of what you can do from an auditing perspective so that you have a process to the chain of custody of where did this code come from, how did we verify that it was safe to deploy and where did it go when we deployed it? Those operational things are starting to come together now and it's going to enable people to. Not in every case, but I think in many cases and, and again, the cost of taking it that last mile will not be zero. But I think you're going to see projects that are able to move a lot quicker because they could go from prototype to production. Particularly for something where you are not trying to build a massively complicated application for marketing, this is really useful. I'm trying to build a really neat interactive experience that leads down to a lead gen form that's not that crazy complicated. A web developer could solve all the. Or we just need to get Stripe to work at the end of this. Those are things that are, that are achievable and are going to be. I'm really excited to see what people come up from an innovation standpoint because I think it's going to enable a lot more resources to go back to creative. Like what are we even trying to do in the first place? What is the experience we're trying to build? How do we really get people to sit up and pay attention and do something that's worth noticing? Because you'll have the ability to move so much faster with the technology that lets you express those ideas. The differentiator is going to be how good were your ideas and the first place.

[B]

Yep. Yeah. No, that's why I'm very excited just looking at the space where now like creatives used to have a hard time because they'd have to wait on, you know, hiring a developer to make something and now it's just who's the most creative and who can type in prompts and you're Saying that next phase is not only creating a prototype, but then also having history of, you know, the different code that was being deployed just to be in a more secure location. When it comes to like actually building, building out the full version of it, but keeping it within the low code or vibe coding tool. Or you're saying that's for helping, like, get it off. This is the part where I'm trying to still understand when it comes to these two different worlds. Cuz lovable for the most part. Or base 44, any of these. A lot of them, you just keep it in the tool.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then if someone tries to take it off, that's actually when I get scared because I'm like, where are you taking it? Why? I don't know if I want it to live anywhere else. But you're saying with the other one, you do take it off or you keep it in there as well. It's just more for production, basically, and it's better for bigger companies and bigger applications.

[A]

The honest answer is the industry's working on figuring this out. Right. There's a world.

[B]

That's why I'm having a hard time maybe understanding everyone's trying to figure it out. Got it.

[A]

That's right. One of the things that actually is a real sticking point, like you're saying once you take it out of the Vibe coding environment, does that mean that you can no longer. Can you Vibe code a new feature for something after it's been deployed? Maybe that's something where people have mixed success today. And so there is this really tricky question of when is it appropriate to take it out of that environment and do you have to? And again, I think it's easier to answer these questions and I'm excited to see people make quicker progress in answering these questions around sort of more. More tightly scoped, lower stakes projects. Like, again, a great creative interactive experience for marketing is different than an application that's going to handle extremely sensitive customer information. So I think we can work a lot of these things out on our side of the fence and actually have an interesting role to play in advancing the industry because we do have a lot of cool projects where people can afford to take a little bit more risk, to be honest.

[B]

Mm. Mm. Exciting. Okay. Anything else in this vibe coding world? Just because I haven't had anyone on the show that's been able to dive this deep into it. Like anything else that you're seeing that is interesting or that you're making bets on at Pantheon or just personally too.

[A]

Yeah. The other thing that I think is really interesting is the ability to do, to do have a vibe coding approach to, to data analysis and being able to, if you're lucky enough to have an organization that has a good data platform and they've got a data lake and there's a lot of stuff in there still, very often you have to make a request to somebody else to figure out how to actually query the data. And I've had some experiences personally where I know enough about our data model to ask some questions, but then I don't really, really. You can get the LLMs that are built into some of these platforms like Snowflake or Bigquery to actually complete what it is you need. Or you can ask Claude to help you write the query you need and get really sophisticated analysis. Now at this stage I always still want to run that by one of the actual analysts, but the cycle time of I cooked this up myself and I think this is showing us pretty interesting. Can you take a look and validate it? That's way quicker than I have an idea for some analysis that might be useful. When will you have time to work on it? That's really interesting to me because I think that again that puts more agency and power in marketers hands. I do think that the profession is just going to become more technical over time because so many more of these things are technology mediated and we want to be masters of that. It's going to become increasingly data informed with more and more data available. That's a traffic trend that. When will that reverse itself? Never. So I think this puts more power and agency in our hands, which is, which is ultimately really a good thing.

[B]

Yeah, I mean what I'm hearing from this, and this has also been a theme that I've heard throughout many, many episodes is like I'm hearing, and maybe this is because I'm biased, but it sounds like marketers get to lean into the more like entrepreneurial notion of, you know, working at companies. Because when I hear what you're saying, I'm like, oh, this is what you do in entrepreneurship. Like, like you build the thing, you figure it out. You're like, I think I have some data. This like can someone else confirm this? I'm gonna push something out to the market and test it. And like you kind of have to have your hands in a lot of things at once and be a little bit like good at it. You don't have to be the expert, you just have to have like enough to be dangerous to ask the right questions. And it sounds like that's what, you know, marketers of the future, they're gonna be expected to be operating like this.

[A]

I mean, so I'm super biased. Cause I come I'm a co founder, right?

[B]

Yeah, we're both biased. We're in a bubble.

[A]

But I think like, okay, but what's the alternative? Right? I think the alternative is like, you know, good marketing has always been like that. And even when even good brand marketing is like that, because you don't just come up with an amazing brand concept that helps break through without having an entrepreneurial approach of understanding the market, understanding the customer, and then having that insight into how can we, you know, again, in a very succinct way, because that's what brand does is it distills it down to just like the essence of what you need that can actually break through. I think in every sort of sub discipline of marketing. I think that entrepreneurial mindset is a tremendous asset. And I think it's just a. And again, the bias that I have is. I also think it's fun.

[B]

No, I think you have to be the right person to think this is fun. I think where I'm looking at is a lot of marketers that I have worked with. This is very new for them because one, they've outsourced a lot of things to agencies, data they've outsourced, I mean, tech things. Like a lot of things have been outsourced to others. I think at least when it comes to bigger companies on marketing teams. So I do think it's a different skill set to be like, how do I get my hands dirty in a lot of these things? But what I also think is interesting is that it is unique to this role. If you think about finance, my background was in finance background in the day, like they're not having as big of a shift being like you have to understand more of these. Like you need to understand a little bit of marketing, a little bit of website development, a little bit more of like it. Like their role is pretty much still kind of similar. I mean, but if you look at other, you know, I mean, COO still kind of similar. Like they're not having to get their hands on all the things. So I just feel like marketing right now looks like it's having the biggest shift when it comes to expectations. And maybe it's always been that way for your company, but for, you know, other companies, it just seems like a big shift.

[A]

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think this, this is, I mean, when did Scott Brinker start writing about, like Martech as a thing and create that category. That's been going on. It's been going on for a while. But I will say it's intensifying.

[B]

Intensifying. I like it.

[A]

And I will say my colleagues on the sales side, their world is getting changed dramatically as well, I think because go to market in general, because so much more. More of what go to market means where you meet customers and prospects. It is digitally mediated. Being excellent in that practice demands that you're fluent. You can't outsource your understanding of that. You may still actually need a ton of help and expertise that's external. But if you don't have, you can't just say, oh, yeah, they do that. For me, I'm just the ideas person. Because their ability to have the ideas that are going to break through requires you to be fluid, fluent in the medium where these things are actually occurring. And that I think has become went from being in the sense. I'm saying it's intensifying. I think that went from being like, oh, well, if you're one of those people, you're like a special unicorn and maybe you can get a lap or two ahead of the competition. That was 10 years ago. Now it's like if you're not fluent in those things, you're like, how do you even do your job this tough?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Okay. I want to. I know we have a couple minutes left and I do want to do a lightning round with you.

[A]

Awesome.

[B]

So the lightning round. I'm going to send a question your way. You have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?

[A]

I'm ready.

[B]

Okay. If your website ships updates annually, you're probably blank.

[A]

Stuck in a waterfall process.

[B]

Success. There you go. What is your most controversial marketing opinion that you believe but you rarely say out loud?

[A]

Most digital demand budget is impossible to conclusively attribute.

[B]

Yes. Facts. What is a guilty pleasure metric that you still peek at even though you'll tell your team that it's vanity and not to at look at it?

[A]

Topline website traffic.

[B]

I like it. I think you said you went to drama school before, right?

[A]

I did.

[B]

That was okay. What's the weirdest thing from drama school that actually helps you as a marketer?

[A]

It's not a weird thing, but just zero stage stage fright.

[B]

I can feel that. I can definitely feel that with you. You're like, I'm here. Yeah, well.

[A]

Or just like someone's like, hey, you. I know you're not prepared, but there's a thing at this conference, there's gonna be like, 200 people there. Do you just want to get up on stage and talk about something? I'll be like, sure. Sounds like fun.

[B]

Oh, my God. Do you do any, like, training with your team to also kind of, like, pass along this to them as well?

[A]

You know? That's a great. The answer is no, but that's a. That makes me feel sad to say that, like, there. But I don't know how. Like. Like, this is a whole other subject. Like, four years of intensive conservatory training is pretty hard to distill into, like, a brown bag. It's just you kind of have to have a lot of it beat into you, and then you emerge changed as a person.

[B]

Okay. A CMO and cto, they're up on stage doing a keynote. What is their walkout song together? Oh.

[A]

I mean, maybe, like, we found love in a hopeless place.

[B]

That's good. I need that to be in this episode somewhere.

[A]

Yeah. Make it sound like I didn't have to pause that long to say it and it'll be killer.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. No, he'll do the editing after this to make it sound fire lightning fast. What is the smallest quality bar on a website that you just refuse to compromise on? Where maybe your team is like, dude, that's like, not a big deal. And you're like, this has to be better.

[A]

For me, it's when the website loads that it doesn't keep jiggling around as other things pop in.

[B]

Wait, tell me more. I'm having a hard time imagining what's jiggling and what's popping in.

[A]

So this happens so often where you have your core, actually existing website and then your layers of Martech, which it's. And you see this all. I mean, it is kind of almost impossible to avoid in, like, when you're consuming articles or media online, it's like I load the article and then the headline jumps down, like, because ads are very intrusive this way. But Martech does the same thing very often where it's adding elements to the experience, and they. They don't. They say, show up late, and then they push the words around or move the experience in ways that you didn't intend after the site loads. And I just think that's. That actually for people with certain accessibility issues that can make it almost impossible for them to even comprehend your content. But I also think it's just very unpleasant and it shows a lack of regard for the user.

[B]

Wow. Okay. That's a good hot tip. I feel like we can have a whole other podcast episode just talking about details like this. That's good. Well, Josh, this was super fun. Thank you for coming on Marketing Trends. Thank you for telling us all these amazing secrets, especially thinking about websites and cto, CMO conversion and friendships and all that. Where can people learn more about you and what you're up to at Pantheon?

[A]

Well, Pantheon is easy to find at Pantheon IO and I am around the Internet as outlandish Josh. I try to post Spicy takes on LinkedIn under my own name from time to time. So yeah, check us out. And if people have any questions, I'm happy. You can always reach out to me through LinkedIn or other places. I'm happy to chat with folks and offer advice.

[B]

Oh, amazing. Thank you, Josh.

[A]

Well, thank you so much for having me on. This is a really fun conversation.