Paid Ads Playoff: Proven B2B Plays That Turn Spend Into Pipeline

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dave Gerhardt Show – "Paid Ads Playoff: Proven B2B Plays That Turn Spend Into Pipeline"

Host: Dave Gerhardt (Exit Five)
Co-Host: Jess Cook (Vector)
Date: July 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

This live episode features Dave Gerhardt and Jess Cook as they host Exit Five’s first-ever "Paid Ads Playoff"—a rapid-fire, competitive session where eight top B2B marketers present their most effective paid advertising plays. Each marketer shares tactical case studies, lessons learned, and creative strategies for turning ad spend directly into pipeline, all while contending for bragging rights and the coveted Exit Five trophy. The lively, interactive format includes audience voting, panel Q&A, and actionable ideas for anyone running paid B2B campaigns—from LinkedIn ads to TV spots, AI-driven ads, creative out-of-home, and more.

Theme:
How the smartest B2B marketers are innovating with paid ads—breaking the "boring B2B" mold, measuring beyond vanity metrics, harnessing new channels, and scaling plays that actually generate pipeline.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power and Challenges of B2B Paid Ads (04:18–04:54)

• Dave Gerhardt: Set the stage for why fresh thinking is overdue in B2B paid ads.
  • “There’s a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge you can get… but wisdom comes from people actually doing the job.” (04:13)
  • Marketers crave not just frameworks, but real examples from peers—the classic ‘swipe file’ approach.

2. Round 1: Innovative Paid Ad Plays (Presentations)

a. Alexander Goodwin (Director, Demand Gen, Fingerprint): "B2B Ads That Stop the Scroll"

08:31–10:31

• Audiences are numb to repetitive, fear-based LinkedIn ads, especially technical personas.
• Switched to fun, memorable creative and Meta-based contact lists, resulting in a 60% increase in activated SLAM apps within 1 month.
• Memorable Quote: “We were stuck in the same malaise of boring creative... so we tackled this by creating this scroll stopping playbook.” (08:31–09:34)
• Cliffhanger: Revealed results, but offered to share the playbook only if advanced to the next round.

b. Human (Tatari): "TV Advertising as a B2B Channel"

10:44–12:41

• Argued TV is now digital: IP targeting = same level of precision as digital ads.
• Used existing creative, ran programmatic TV with <$20K, saw $200K pipeline generated.
• Quote: “It’s one of those rare channels that works full-funnel... it drives demand at the top, but it also drives qualified demo requests, product signups and pipeline.” (11:12)
• Played part of a TV spot—emphasizing authenticity and direct response results.

c. Stephanie (SurveyMonkey): "Data-Driven Out-of-Home for Brand Perception"

12:56–14:33

• Noted SurveyMonkey is recognized, but only as “the survey company.”
• Launched measurable out-of-home (“What if you just knew?”), defined control/test markets, got 244M impressions, saw a 7% lift over seasonal dip.
• “As most of you know, out-of-home campaigns are really hard to measure. So we set up control and test markets to help measure it.” (13:22)

d. Jake Newby (Dir. Growth Marketing, Lendio): "Long-form Video on LinkedIn"

15:21–17:49

• Eschewed short clips for 10+ minute explainer videos targeting economic buyers & champions.
• Lower engagement metrics, but 60% lower CPL and $100K deal size; 5 demos from $4,500 in spend.
• Quote: “People judge an ad… but this ad does not look good… it was highest performing.” (17:07–17:35)

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3. Round 1 Q&A: Lessons & Mindset Shifts

(18:09–24:45)

• Human (Tatari): TV is now as targetable/measurable as digital; prefers self-reported attribution + incrementality (19:14–20:06).
• Alexander: Mimicked B2C ads on Meta, focusing on memes and relatability (20:35–21:34).
• Stephanie: In OOH, measurement relies on company-level data, trends over time, insights from BI teams; impact can take 6–9 months to appear (22:23–23:25).
• Jake: Revealed their long-form video wasn’t fully “approved,” relied on a simple outline & authentic presentation (23:33–24:45).

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4. Round 2: More Winning Paid Ad Plays

a. Anthony Blattner (Speedwork Social): "Incentivized Demos"

26:31–28:20

• Most controversial—but most direct—way to turn ad spend into meetings/pipeline. Example: $100K spend → $4M pipeline.
• Quote: “Some people hate them, some love them… they have the highest show rate.” (27:14)

b. Dylan (Packview): "ChatGPT Ads as Demand-Capture Channel"

28:55–34:05, 51:33–54:04

• Beta-tested ChatGPT ads via KEVL. Shifted 900% more spend after seeing strong results, all from Google Ads budget.
• Emphasized the difficulty of staying visible as AI chat/answers displaces traditional search results.
• Quote: “Tons of our traffic was just getting consumed by these AI platforms… it’s never been more difficult to capture that demand.” (33:01)

c. Kenna (Easy Llama): "Testing Google AI Max—With Limits"

35:15–37:13, 43:16–46:06

• Carefully rolled out Google “AI Max” for search, kept targeting tight and high-intent, saw lower CPA, more demos, early pipeline impact—despite the rise of AI Overview pushing ads down.
• Lesson: Don’t trust AI blindly—keep it close to high-intent; measure impact on spend and organic results.

d. Shlomo (Onboard): "Personification & Creative Analogies in B2B Ads"

37:29–39:23, 54:12–56:55

• Borrowed from Apple’s “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC”—made HR software into relatable characters.
• Showed creative ad video with strong results: 1,000+ leads, 80% cheaper than usual.
• Subsequent round: Used voice of customer research on Reddit to inform ad analogies (“email ping pong” = HR requests/follow-ups).
• Memorable Quote: “Why would it be boring? Even if it’s for engineers… it could be technical, but it still should be fun, beautiful, interesting—should look like you care.” (44:11)

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5. Audience Q&A: What’s Working & How to Measure (39:43–46:35)

• Shlomo: Multiple creative executions using personification; test different approaches.
• Dylan: Early ChatGPT ad results promising (demos/CTR), but true ROI will emerge over longer cycle.
• Anthony: For competitor conquesting, build account lists using 3rd-party data, tailor ad copy, incentivize demos (42:09).
• Kenna: AI Max: Start with healthy budget, monitor; AI Overview now reads site copy to shape ad messaging (46:06).
• Control: Each AI ad platform offers various degrees of message control. ChatGPT offers more via hints; Google AI relies more on on-page content (45:19–46:35).

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6. The Playoff Finals: Head-to-Head Tactics Revealed

Each finalist (Jake, Dylan, Shlomo) shares deeper dives with frameworks and specific takeaways:

a. Jake:

Long-form Video Framework on LinkedIn (48:15–51:20)

• Target: Narrow account list, champion/economic buyer.
• Track: Fiddler + LinkedIn for engagement; Vector for contact-level data; Clay + HubSpot for enrichment/scoring.
• Content Structure: Call out ICP, name concrete problem, open loop, establish authority, show the solution, tie to prospect’s goals, position yourself as only option.
  • “You can keep someone for as long as you want watching video, if what you’re saying lands…” (50:31)

b. Dylan:

ChatGPT Ads Experimental Strategy (51:33–54:04)

• Dedicate budget to experimentation (20%), diversify into new channels regularly.
• Inform ChatGPT prompts using Google keyword data, experiment with ad “hints.”
• Best results from mid-funnel, educational ads personalized to ChatGPT prompt.

c. Shlomo:

Creative Analogies Research & Execution (54:12–56:55)

• Use Reddit (Voice of Customer) to mine frustrations, pain points, and analogies for creative.
• Turns “email ping pong” insight into impactful, entertaining HR software ads with strong performance metrics.

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7. Winner Announcement & Closing

• Audience Final Vote: Shlomo wins for exceptional creative strategy and execution in “boring” B2B.
  • “Overwhelming. Way to go, Shlomo.” (57:19)
• Closing thanks to all participants, Vector (sponsor), Jess Cook.
• Dave’s refrain: “Real marketers sharing real examples—this is what our whole thing is about.” (57:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This is my actual [signature]. My children make fun of me… I have 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. I don’t need a signature.” – Dave Gerhardt, joking about AI check for the prize (07:51)
• “If you vote for me, I’ll tell you how we got an unaware security and engineering audience to stop scrolling and start clicking...” – Alexander Goodwin (10:02)
• “The real risk is publishing AI content that’s generic, off-brand, or unusable. Markup AI helps you catch that first…” – Dave Gerhardt, ad read with a point (01:32)
• “I’m a real hater though. I’m interested to see.” – Jess Cook, re: incentivized demos (28:42)
• “Cheapest cpm, highest thumbstop rate, and also best hold rate… but you need both hold rate and conversions.” – Shlomo (56:34)
• “Why would it be boring? Even if it’s for engineers ... it should look like you care.” – Shlomo (44:11)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Section/Event | |--------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:13 | Dave on knowledge vs wisdom, show format explained | | 08:31–10:31 | Alexander Goodwin’s “scroll stopping B2B ads” play | | 10:44–12:41 | Tatari’s case for TV as a B2B channel | | 12:56–14:33 | SurveyMonkey’s measurable out-of-home | | 15:21–17:49 | Lendio’s long-form LinkedIn video explainer | | 18:09–24:45 | Round 1 Q&A: TV, OOH measurement, long-form video approval | | 26:31–28:20 | Incentivized demos for pipeline (Speedwork Social) | | 28:55–34:05 | ChatGPT ads experiment (Packview) | | 35:15–37:13 | Google AI Max, keeping control (Easy Llama) | | 37:29–39:23 | Personification ad creative (Onboard) | | 39:43–46:35 | Q&A: Message control, measurement, creative approaches | | 48:15–51:20 | Jake’s detailed LinkedIn video framework | | 51:33–54:04 | Dylan’s ChatGPT ad play deep dive | | 54:12–56:55 | Shlomo’s Reddit-informed creative analogies | | 57:19 | Winner announced: Shlomo | | 57:25 | Closing thanks, why real examples matter |

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Key Takeaways for B2B Marketers

• Break the Mold: Don’t settle for boring, predictable ads—find creative formats, voices, and analogies that stand out (even in “serious” spaces).
• Data + Creativity: Combine smart targeting (including TV, out-of-home, AI-powered channels) with standout creative to drive both awareness and measurable pipeline.
• Experiment Relentlessly: Dedicate budget to new channels and formats—start small, prove results, then scale.
• Measure What Matters: Focus less on “vanity” digital ad metrics, more on cost per pipeline, demo, or ICP click. Use advanced attribution, including self-reported, to get the real impact.
• Learn from Peers: Swipe files > static frameworks. Real use cases, tested by working marketers, are invaluable.

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Tone & Format

• Conversational, quick-witted, high-energy.
• Emphasis on actionable examples, honesty about limitations, and learning through experimentation.

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For the Full List of Playbooks, Examples, and Slides

Refer to Exit Five’s post-event recap on exitfive.com, including Shlomo’s Notion page with creative research prompts, ad examples, and swipe files.

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This summary captures all major topics, highlights winning tactics, and spotlights the people, quotes, and frameworks that made this “Paid Ads Playoff” an idea-packed, must-listen episode for B2B marketers intent on making their ad budget count.

Transcript

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web, built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform an AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your homepage anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists. Which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them [e-mail] Exit 5. That's webflow.com for Exit 5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Markup AI. AI has made it really easy to produce a lot of content. But producing content fast and producing content that's publish ready are not the same thing. By publish ready, I mean it follows your brand guidelines. It sounds like you, and it's a good fit for your audience. I'm seeing a lot of marketers right now running their content through a bunch of different AI tools trying to get to a final product. But by the time it comes out the other end, it doesn't sound anything like them. It just sounds like AI. And that's the AI slot problem. And it's why there's a growing sense of frustration with AI content right now. Markup AI fixes that. It sits in your content creation, workflow, scanning and scoring your content against your brand, voice, preferred terms and messaging standards before anything goes live. Markup AI even checks for AI visibility, best practices, and works directly inside Google Docs so there's no edit, extra tool or handoff. Grammar was never your hardest problem. Well, speak for yourself. The real risk is publishing AI content that's generic, off brand or unsitable. True Markup AI helps you catch that first. So you're always putting your best stuff out there. Go and check it out at Markup AI. That's Markup AI. You're listening to the Dave Gehard Show.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Exit.

[Stephanie (SurveyMonkey)]

Exit.

[Dave Gerhardt]

12212. All right, my co host, Jess Cook. Jess Cook, We're Back today we are doing. We're live. We're back.

We're live.

It's a couple minutes early, but some folks, you know, this. This is a big deal. This thing is buzzing. I have had multiple, you know, people from Netflix, hbo, some of the biggest producers have heard about what we're doing here, innovating on the webinar format here at Exit 5. And I heard they're going to be in the crowd today. But we're back. And today we're talking about paid ads because there's no such thing as free ads.

[Human (Tatari)]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I'm trying to just fill here for another minute because who. It's 1:59 where I'm at. Are you on east coast time?

[Jess Cook]

I am. Michigan is Eastern time zone.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Never been to Michigan. Popular belief.

[Jess Cook]

Oh, you would love it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I know, I know. I'm. There's a whole, like, I listen to this golf podcast and they got all these. They're like, Michigan is like the most underrated place. The lakes, the summer.

It's like Vermont.

Vermont in the summer, Vermont the rest of the year. I'm all set with, though.

[Jess Cook]

Yeah, same. I'm. Yeah, I'm gonna be one of those people that has, like, a house in the south at some point.

[Shlomo]

Okay.

[Jess Cook]

I'm into that Charleston because I can't winter.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Tough dude.

[Jess Cook]

Yeah. Yeah, I do. I have to say, I love that your team did this blitz, what, two weeks ago?

[Anthony Blattner]

Yeah.

[Jess Cook]

And then you're like, it works so well. We're doing it again.

[Shlomo]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Double down, you know, And Marissa figured a bunch of things out, and here we are. The first one actually was pulled off in seven days, so we had more time to do this.

[Jess Cook]

That's amazing.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're here. My name is Dave Gerhardt. I'm the founder of Exit 5. This is my co host, Jess Cook. She runs marketing at Vector. Cool company in the space that I'm going to tell you about in a minute. We do these Exit 5 live sessions twice a month. But two weeks ago, we hit on something. We have this really fun format, which Forbes has called it the most innovative webinar of all time. We now are the number one webinar company in the G2 category.

[Shlomo]

No.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So we call them Exit 5 live sessions because our whole job at Exit 5 is to help get you smarter about B2B marketing. Look, I don't take your time for granted. You certainly could be spending your time talking to ChatGPT or talking to Claude. But the benefit that we offer here at Exit 5 is real marketers sharing real examples. Because there's a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge you can get. I can go talk to Claude and get a one page marketing plan. But wisdom comes from people actually doing the job and we found that that's what marketers love. You know, marketers from the beginning time, I've always kept a swipe file of examples and people love seeing what other marketers are doing. So that's what we're back here to do today. This time the topic is ads. We are doing a deep dive on ads. We chose this topic because we know that that's something that every single person in B2B marketing is doing. Someone is doing something with paid. And we're here today to dig into this format. We got eight speakers, two minutes each. We're going to go through both of them. So we have two groups of four. We're going to bring everybody up on the stage after. So two minutes and everybody up on the stage for Q and A. You all in the audience are going to vote. So don't be alarmed when someone comes off the stage at two minutes. They're going to be in the chat and they're going to come back up after and you're going to have the opportunity to get some clarity, get some Q and A. We're going to pick some winners to advance to the next round. And then at the end of this, I'm really going fast right now, so hold on, let me see, I'll shout out our group here. So we got Alexander, Human, Stephanie, Jake, Anthony, Dylan, Kenna and Shlomo. And we're also going to give out a prize. We're going to pick one winner at the end of this and not only we're going to make a $100 charitable donation to the charity of your choice, but I love this, we are going to send you a person. We're going to engrave your name forever etched in his. Etched in stone, etched in plastic, wherever Dan got this trophy from. And you're going to post it on LinkedIn af res the paid ads playoff prize winner plus a bunch of exit 5 swag. And you know, real quick, I just want to give a shout out to Jess Cook and the team at Vector for helping us put together this webinar and be our spons for today. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel. These are people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. And you end up just showing ads to job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. Vector lets you preview exactly who's going to see your ads before spending a dime. And when someone clicks, you know who it was by name, not just company. Finally, you can stop reporting cost per click and start reporting cost per ICP click. That is a metric that we love. The result is paid ads that operate like abm, only smarter, targeted, personalized and connected to real pipeline. If you're curious about what Vector can do for you, what can Vector do for you? I like that. Alexander, one of our guest speakers today, is actually a Vector customer and has some results. He's had been linked in the chat today. His team used Vector to build one audience at five. Finally worked across LinkedIn, Meta and Reddit, reaching more of the right people at a fraction of the cost. Check them out. Vector co Vector Co. Thanks again to their team for sponsoring this live session and for Jess Cook making it easy to have a good co host running along side of me today. Did I miss anything? So here's the thing. I'm doing this thing on the road right now. I don't have all my monitors, so I don't have my team in my ear like I usually do. So that's kind of why I'm a little bit all over the place. But we're making it work. Jessica, did I miss anything? What are you excited about? And we'll get into this.

[Jess Cook]

I'm giving you the coffee house snaps over here. It was beautiful.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Thanks.

[Jess Cook]

I would like to go back one slide though, because I feel like someone's trying to forge your signature on that check.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, dude, you should see. First of all, David Gearhart.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Look at this.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Look at. This is why AI is not going to replace any of us. This is an AI generated image for David. G E A R H. First of all, my signature is completely. This is my actual. This is what my signature looks like. My children make fun of. They're like, who is that? I'm like, I have 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. I don't need to have a signature.

[Dylan]

Give me out of here.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, let's do it. I'm excited. Jess, I'll see you in a couple minutes. At the end of this, we'll have our group back up here. And without further ado, we're going to roll it. Let's bring up Alexander Goodwin. He's director of Demand Generation at Fingerprint let's do it.

[Shlomo]

Hello.

[Dave Gerhardt]

The fastest two minutes of your life coming up.

[Shlomo]

Here we go.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Welcome to the paid ads playoff, baby.

[Alexander Goodwin]

All right, let's get it. So my play is B2B ads that stop the scroll. I'm Alex. I'm the director of demand generation at Fingerprint. We're a device intelligence company and so we primarily sell into financial services software companies. And our core Personas are typically engineering fraud product leaders. And as you can imagine, they're very used to the typical LinkedIn creative that's like very fear based, talks about the challenges and risks of fraud. And so they've seen this creative a hundred times. So we were getting stuck in that same malaise of boring creative. We were also falling into the trap of spending way too much on LinkedIn, you know, $10 CPCs, trying to reach the same percentage that all of our competitors were trying to target with the same boring messaging. And obviously when you have developers as well, they tend to not use LinkedIn as much. So it was really difficult for us to get any level of reach or frequency in front of these individuals. And then lastly, we were also compounding that with the challenge of being in an unfamiliar category. Device intelligence isn't really well defined and our prospects were familiar with the pains that they were experiencing, but not the solution. So we tackled this by creating this scroll stopping playbook. So the playbook includes how we unlocked meta ads by using contact based plays and intent and also covers how we unbeatab our creative by making it fun and engaging and focusing on memorability as well as the behaviors that have got people to this point in their feedback. And this all resulted in a 60% increase in activated slam apps within the first month and some surprising other results that I'll cover. So please vote me into the next round and I'll tell you how we got an unaware security and engineering audience to stop scrolling and start clicking our ads and engage with us on our website.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Dang. I've never seen. Look, people are already innovated. That's the first cta. That's the first person who had the cta. Please. So da da da da. Here's what I did. Please vote me into the next round and I will. Which is like the classic marketer, like so you can blank. Oh my goodness. Love that cliffhanger.

[Shlomo]

That's right.

[Human (Tatari)]

I love it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And he's just gonna let the clock run out.

[Anthony Blattner]

Like what?

[Alexander Goodwin]

I don't need it.

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

I don't need.

[Dylan]

Give it to somebody else.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, great, Alexander. We'll See you. Good job. We'll see you in a minute.

[Jess Cook]

Love it. I got yanked off so fast.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hit the button.

[Jess Cook]

Right.

[Human (Tatari)]

It's me, Human, Senior director of marketing at Tatari. We made TV advertising work for tv. And here are the reasons why we decided to add TV into our marketing mix. It was an opportunity for us to stand out. Unlike social, we didn't have to fight for attention of our audience. It was really low risk for us to test a net new channel with as low as 10 to 20k and see if it works for us. We didn't need to produce a net new creative. We just repurposed existing video and assets targeting as good as digital measurability, same as the rest of our marketing mix. And lastly, and most importantly, it's one of those rare channels that works full funnel. It drives demand at the top, but it also drives direct response, qualified demo requests, product signups and pipeline. So with that, I'm going to play one of our top performing video creatives on tv.

[Dave Gerhardt]

If anyone tells you you can programmatically do television for the rest of your life, they're full of it. Don't listen to an online video company pretending to be a TV company.

[Jake Newby]

You could probably get started with some

[Dave Gerhardt]

of them and probably see some return, but that's not going to scale. Relationships matter. I want to be the first person NBC calls when somebody falls out of a game. Should you do some programmatic?

[Jake Newby]

Absolutely.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Is that the one size fits all? No, it's not. The winners are going to marry data, technology and relationships.

[Human (Tatari)]

So this was a sponsored fireside chat session that we had. It was a 20 minutes, did some post production with under $1,000. We made a TV add spot. It feels real because it is real. And look at the results. $20,000 spent, 2 million operations and just under $200,000 generated in pipeline. I've got a few more secrets with you, but only if I make it to the nitrack. They all did.

[Jess Cook]

I'm like furiously writing down questions over here. I hope I wish everyone can make it to the next.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, please. That is so Michigan of you. Everyone. I wish everyone to everyone, everyone to have fun. Everyone's gonna do great. All right, Stephanie's here.

[Stephanie (SurveyMonkey)]

Hello. Let me know when I'm good to go.

[Dave Gerhardt]

You're on, sister. Send it.

[Stephanie (SurveyMonkey)]

Okay, perfect. All right, let's talk about measurable and data driven out of home campaigns. So everyone probably knows SurveyMonkey. We don't really have a brand awareness problem, but we do have a brand perception problem because everyone thinks that we just do surveys, but we do a lot more than that. So we launched an out of home campaign, and we called it what if you just knew? Because probably everyone on this call has asked themselves at least once in their career, like, what if I just knew what to price my product? Or what if I just knew what ad to ship that would work in the market? So the out of home first campaign was built using really deep insights and data driven insights. So from the markets we chose to the channels we ran from the creatives going throughout the funnel. And as most of you know, out of home campaigns are really hard to measure. So we set up control and test markets to help measure it. So the good part here, the fun part is we got 244 million impressions. Page views were up for Chicago and Boston, and over Easter, we actually saw a 7% increase when usually we see a really big seasonality dip just because it's Easter. And if I make it to the next round, I can really go through how we set up control markets. What were some of the data that we pulled to really make those control markets work? And then also how we use creative throughout the funnel to make sure it was like a seamless customer customer journey.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Love it. And here's your 23 seconds back. That was awesome.

[Jake Newby]

I love this.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I'm not biasing. I just have some time to fill here. There's a trend here which is really interesting, is more B2B companies doing more stuff out of home just because everyone's kind of just. You're either talking to AI or you're out there in the wild doing stuff. And the number one question I've been doing this for, you know, 15 years now is like, how do I measure this? How do I measure this? So cool to see someone with a real example do it. And good job, because obviously, if you drive more results, you get to spend more and keep your job and have more fun. And, you know, out of home is fun. So it is for sure.

[Jake Newby]

For sure.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And it's the one thing that like people, even if your family doesn't know what you do, they think it's cool. They're like, look at this bus my daughter wrapped. You know, so you get it.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Yeah.

[Jess Cook]

That's like an easy thing for them to understand. For sure.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Sure. All right, let's bring up Jake. Jake Newby, director of growth marketing at Lendio.

[Jake Newby]

Howdy. Howdy. Okay, so most companies put the majority of their spend towards static ads or short video clips because retention and engagement metrics say to do so at Lendio we bet heavily on what we call longer form LinkedIn ads. We want prospects to consume in feed. The majority of our spend goes towards video of some sort. 19 minute 49 second explainer video drove one of our most efficient cost per demo results we've ever had. We bet big on video for three reasons. One, it's room to make the whole pitch. Explain who you are, what you do, the problems you solve, your unique position and practice the pitch in depth at scale. Two, it's the format that actually moves a prospect to think and buy it the way that you want them to. And three, it gives your sales team sharper signals on who's watching what content and how often. Initial results. We ran this ad to a very select group of champion and economic buyer titles in our target account list. In the first few weeks, this 10 minute video produced five demos from roughly $4,500 in spend. Our average deal size is roughly 100,000. We saw 30 video completions. And this is super important because again, this is champion and economic buyer titles are named accounts. So that means that basically we're paying $150 for our ideal enterprise prospects to consume 10 minutes of content on how our product uniquely solves their problems. And then if you were to look at kind of vanity metrics, the on platform metrics, looking at engagement metrics, this ad looks like it sucked because it's super long compared to our account averages. Everything looked expensive, everything looked like it was performing worse. But when you actually look at our cost per book Demo, it was 60% lower than our account average. Strategically, for us, we're optimizing for what actually moves prospects, not what looks good in your ad account. And if you go for me and give me another four minutes, I will show you how we track signals for display, how we structured the content and how to optimize plus variations that you can go and try in your accounts.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Love it. You said we have some time. You said one of my favorite things, which is like, and look, we do this, this is kind of like our company and our job and people do it on LinkedIn. But people will judge an ad. But will you just sort of said like, this ad does not look good, it looks bad. But it was the highest performing. My old boss, a mentor of mine, used to always tell me, be like, you know what the highest converting website in the world is like Craigslist, Amazon, it's like, so don't let someone screenshot you know your ad on LinkedIn and have their opinion on it. When you have the truth, which is the data behind the scenes.

[Jake Newby]

Yeah, yeah,

[Jess Cook]

I love too that the said that like I would tell you to kill that ad and that's why we need humans. Because you knew as a marketer like no, don't kill it. Like look at this other data.

[Stephanie (SurveyMonkey)]

Love it.

[Jake Newby]

Yeah, it's all pipeline in the day, right? Demos built in pipeline.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, we got a bunch of questions for our guests. Side note, one of the coolest things I'm noticing in the chat right now is a bunch of your bosses are here in the not webinar, which is so freaking cool. I love that Katie's runs marketing at SurveyMonkey. She's here. Spud's here too, runs marketing at Lendia,

[Dylan]

which is so cool.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Okay, let me. I don't know, I'm trying to get myself organized here. We have a bunch of questions. Thank you. In our internal slack. Okay, so question number one. These are for whom and what information is needed for a customer profile? Can you compare the cost of TV ads to other methods and platforms? And how did you measure the direct response of your TV ad?

[Human (Tatari)]

So when it comes to Persona and targeting, similar to how you do for the rest of your channels, all of you are doing some sort of abm. So you know what type of companies titles Persona, firmographic and all that jazz your appler and you can build those audiences for TV targeting. TV is now a digital channel, streaming tv. The IP address targeting gives us the power of targeting the exact same people that we want. So there is literally no difference about how you go about it. There is your channel in terms of the measurement. We look at it two ways. We heavily rely on how do you hear about us for the source of truth. And we add some other criteria to make it truly incremental impact. Because we know there are leads that would have converted anyway without even our TV ads. So we look at it that way. But also we look at the other loose metrics directionally. Like similar to view through attribution that is accessible for all the digital platforms. You can have those metrics in Atari TV ad platform. We use our own platform to do this. And you can see how many website visits what's driven from those particular TV ad spots. Because it's closed loop attribution. It's no different than how meta will report to those metrics. But I'm in favor of incrementality and how did you hear about us and self reported attributions. We'll look at both and I'm happy to share my playbook with everybody else. I know there's not enough time, but just hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm happy to carve out time, meet with you and make this work for you.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Jess, you got any questions over there? I'm trying to sort out.

[Human (Tatari)]

I do, yeah, go ahead.

[Jess Cook]

Full of them, Alex.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So I think we checked the box on whom in there. Alexander, Stephanie and Jake.

[Jess Cook]

I have one for Alexander, actually. So I think this is a classic example of like, the media is the message. So you kind of moved over to Facebook and you really had to change, like, how you put that message in front of people. Like, how did you think through, like, okay, the creative really has to match people's behaviors here. How did you think through that?

[Alexander Goodwin]

Yeah, we spent a lot of time looking at B2C ads on Meta and like, trying to understand, like, what was working for those audiences. And typically what we found was that a lot of B2C companies selling consumer goods or whatever are using memes to sell those products. They're focusing on relatability, focusing on the feeling and the individual. And so I think there's a level of freedom that you access when you move away from traditional B2B platforms like LinkedIn, where you can kind of just have more fun with it and try and communicate directly to the person. And so we focus less on trying to highlight our message or value proposition to the same extent and more on communicating directly to the individual. And like the subtle levels of embarrassment about being on your phone for four hours and scrolling through your MetaFeed that isn't really providing a lot of value to you and instead focusing on helping you get better at your job. And we just iterated over time. So we've run, I think, like over 30 different variants of this concept of the past, like two months already. And we have like a bunch of different plays that we're coming up with every week now.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey, quick one to build on that. This one was in the chat from Sarah for Alex. Was your org already aligned on such a different tone to take for ads or was that something you had to overcome? Love seeing companies and industries that take themselves super seriously realize their consumers are human, with triggers outside of fear.

[Alexander Goodwin]

Yeah, it's a great question. Definitely was something that we had to overcome. We started small, we tested a while ago, some CTV campaigns about two years ago with a radically different direction. And we ran some small regional based market testing and we found that there was a significant incremental lift in exposure to those campaigns. And so that helped us to validate that we could Take more risks, have fun with it and then we're able to extend that out across like our other channels and initiatives. And obviously as it grows and the metrics come back, it becomes an easy justification to make love it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

This one's for Stephanie. Would love some tips for effective measurement out of home tactics for non marketing stakeholders. Is there a platform you use to measure signal that you can tie to investment specifically? Any insights on this?

[Stephanie (SurveyMonkey)]

Yeah, so we use all of our internal data to measure out of home ads and then really rely on our reps as well. So we're really fortunate to have a business intelligence team here at SurveyMonkey. We always kind of go to them with how we want to track and then rely on their excellence to kind of inform us on how they would track it. So a lot of it is just using that data and it's more kind of company level data that we have to draw conclusions from because especially with out of home you just don't get that data given to you. You don't actually know how many people kind of see it. So we rely on a lot of like trends kind of over time and a lot of the time those trends don't appear until six or nine months later because it takes a while for like the top of funnel to really get down to the bottom funnel.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Jess Cook, Anything for any of these folks or specific question for Jake?

[Jess Cook]

I have one for Jake. Jake, of course you do because you're

[Dave Gerhardt]

a gosh dang pro. Jess Cook.

[Jess Cook]

My gosh, I know what I'm doing here. Jake. Curious. You know, 9 minutes and 49 seconds. That is a decent amount of time to fill. And Then also like 9 minute 49 second long script is a lot to get approved. Like talk through how you actually got that asset approved by all the powers that be so you could actually put it out in the wild.

[Jake Newby]

So I'm hesitant because Dave said that my boss is on this. So I'm kind of hesitant to admit this, but I don't know that it was 100% approved.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Okay.

[Jake Newby]

Your, your boss is cool.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Your boss is cool as shit.

Yeah.

[Shlomo]

Yeah.

[Jake Newby]

So basically what we did to create the structure, I if you vote for me, you're going to see the full content structure of how I laid it out in that video. But just as a sneak peek, basically I created essentially three things that I wanted to hit in that video. Backed into like what are the seven engagement checklist things that I'm going to show later if I get voted what those are going to hit and then we just did like three or four practice riffs at 9 minutes and 50 seconds. We didn't script it out. I just made sure directionally, the person who was presenting was just hitting on the things that I wanted them to hit on. So it was more of just like a general outline. Talk how you would normally talk and then film with them and that's it.

[Jess Cook]

Amazing.

[Human (Tatari)]

All right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And we got some time back for the time Gods out there. Hey, let's just give it up at home real quick. Stephanie Alexander, Jake Hooman. I'm in this conference room by myself. Everybody's like, what the heck this. Who's talking about? Who's this guy? My son goes, blah, blah, blah. B2B marketing. That's what I feel like I'm doing right now in this conference in the sky. All right. Producer Marissa is behind the scenes and she's about to roll the poll. You know, hey, we're proud of you all. No offense. As my daughter says, no offense. No offense, you know, but there can only be. I don't know, how many winners are we picking from this round?

[Alexander Goodwin]

What is my.

[Dave Gerhardt]

What do my notes say, Jess? You know, you know this answer.

[Jess Cook]

Well, I think one winner per group, right? And then we have an ultimate winner.

[Dylan]

Oh, yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

The ultimate winner. Who gets the trust.

[Jess Cook]

The ultimate.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Where's that pull at? Yeah, Next time I'm gonna DJ at the same time.

[Jess Cook]

Usher remixes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, my gosh. The greatest Usher remix of all time. I'm gonna say it on the count of three. It's obviously, you don't have to call Luna, but we'll. That's for a separate session. Nobody else wants that right now. Do we have a poll? Let's see. It's not on the screen. I haven't seen it. My slack is telling me that. Our winner, Mr. Jake Newby. That's very exciting. Congratulations, Jake. Very big news.

[Jake Newby]

Huge news.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Because your boss is in the room. We're like, look, I appreciate you all giving us the time today. We'll see you back there. Don't worry. We have consolation prizes, which Dan said he's going to like all of your LinkedIn posts for perpetuity. So we will make sure nobody leaves here empty handed. All right, so that's the first half. Now we have four more speakers. We got Anthony, Dylan, Kenna, and Shlomo. So we got it. Roll it. We're back on the clock.

[Human (Tatari)]

We're back in here.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We got Anthony Bladner. You know the LinkedIn two times.

[Jake Newby]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

He knows what he's doing. He knows.

[Jess Cook]

Yeah.

[Human (Tatari)]

All right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Smash that like button. Smash that subscribe button. Here we go.

[Anthony Blattner]

So my name is Anthony Blattner. I'm the managing director of Speedwork Social. All we do is LinkedIn ads. Today we're talking about the most controversial play in B2B advertising. So let's get into it. We're talking about incentivized demos out there. So the whole topic here of this live event is how to turn ad spend directly into pipeline. For Most of you B2B companies out there, you have to have a meeting in there in the middle. So this tactic is the most direct and fastest way to turn your ad spend into meetings and deals in your pipeline. When we say incentivize demos, what do we mean by that? We mean giving the prospect a little bit of sweetener to get them onto a call. There's lots of examples out there. I think a lot of people know the company ramp here. They have lots of examples. So I'm going to use this because a lot of people know what ramp is. But most common is giving your prospect a gift card for taking a demo. Now, some people hate them and some people love these. If you talk to your performance marketing manager, they might love them. If you talk to your head of brand, they probably hate them. But they are the fastest way to get your prospects on a call. They also have the highest show up rate. I know that's a huge shocker. But the cons are to consider they don't work for everyone and they are very easy to mess up. A few results I'll touch on real quick is we've run this many times. One enterprise SaaS company has a very specific target account list that they want to be reaching and their salespeople just want more. At bats with that company. They spent 100k on these incentivized demo ads and drove almost 4 million in pipeline. One HR company did a competitor conquesting. We went competitor by competitor and had a 45x pipe to spend. And then a new a company launching a new AI product was able to get these meetings and then convert 77% of those meetings into trial. So vote me to the next stage if you want the tips and tricks templates and sales process tips, boom.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All the timing on that, that was great. Love it.

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

I love it.

[Anthony Blattner]

I saw the timer in the right corner. I was like, all right, we gotta move to the next slide.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Jess, I'm a huge fan of when we myth bust. And so it's like, yep, well, you may not like incentivized demos, you may not like getting these messages. But I like when someone's like, okay, that's great. That's an opinion. But the real as, like, they work.

And here's why.

I love stuff like that.

[Jess Cook]

I do, too, because I'm a real hater, though. So I'm interested to see. I'm interested.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like, I'm not going to take a meeting for a $10 Domino's gift card. Respectfully. See, I did it respectfully.

[Shlomo]

All right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Dylan set us off.

[Dylan]

Dave, you're a bit a better person than I am. I would definitely do it for a dollar.

[Dave Gerhardt]

10 was kind of rock.

[Jake Newby]

Sorry.

[Shlomo]

You know.

[Dylan]

It's okay. It's okay. Great. So we'll keep this super brief. I believe my team has started, but my name is Dylan. I'm an associate director of demand gen at a company called packview. We work in the retail media and e commerce space, helping really large enterprise brands sell more stuff on marketplaces like Walmart, Target, Amazon. We probably work with all of the consumer packaged goods brands that you have in your house and a bunch more. So I lead a small paid ads team globally. We're running ads across a bunch of different channels, but I wanted to share a little bit more about what we've been doing with ChatGPT ads. We got Access Packvi as a beta partner of OpenAI with the launch of ChatGPT ads through one of our agency partners called Kevl. They're awesome. Definitely go check them out. But we've been essentially testing this out as an experiment, as a marketing team. So a little bit more just about that. Before I dive in and share the secret sauce, I wanted to share an explanation on why we call it paid ads. Dave, I had to give it a shot. The reason we just don't call it advertising is because the CFO needs to know the money left the account, which I thought was pretty fun.

[Dave Gerhardt]

CFO is so aloof that they need to be told that it's paid advertising, like, free. Anyway, side note, we'll take that offline.

[Dylan]

We'll take that offline. But I thought it was a good start. But, you know, we were doing a really modern attempt to add like B2B paid and advertising and personalization and trying to bring it all of this together, you know, and we've tried to simplify our funnel, try and do personalization throughout this. We've been using, you know, a bunch of different signals to then enrich contact data, to then push them into different ad channels, create personalized content. But we just kept on coming up to this challenge. That it doesn't really matter if you don't show up on the first search result in Google.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by optimizely. Optimizely is a platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences and optimize your website. All powered by agentic AI. Most of us are using AI to write faster copy emails, briefs, and honestly that's fine, it's useful, but it's also kind of the boring part of what AI can actually do for a marketing team. The shift that's actually worth your attention right now is using AI to handle coordination inside your team. Not just content creation, but the routing, the flagging, the context tracking that eats up everyone's week. There's a better way, and that's what Optimizely's agent platform is built for. With everything going on in AI right now, building agents into your marketing workflow is one of the most useful places you could be putting your energy and optimizely is a great tool to help you do so. Plus, it's no code, so every marketer can create agents without developer dependencies. So if you're agent curious but not sure what the next step actually looks like and optimizely put together a resource that gets into real examples of teams using agents and what it could look like for you, go and check it out and learn more about [e-mail] exit 5 that's Optimizely.com exit 5 hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Walker Sands, an integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency. Here's something I see happen all the time in marketing. The team is busy pumping out campaigns, shipping content, managing channels.

The list goes on.

But when you zoom out and look at all that activity together, the results don't add up like they should. It's not always obvious how the daily work connects to business growth. That's the challenge that Walker Sands solves. They help B2B marketing leaders get clear on what actually matters business outcomes. They work with you to build a go to market strategy around your desired outcomes. With the right messaging, the right channels and measuring the right impacts so your team's work ladders up to that big goal. Walker Sands has been helping leaders turn marketing strategy into measurable business impact for over 25 years and they work with brands like Amazon Business, Globant and Commerce Tools. Their whole outcome based marketing model is built around the Concept that brand demand and revenue are one conversation, not three separate silos.

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

I love that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

If your marketing feels busy but a little disconnected from the bigger picture, Walker Sands is worth looking into. Go check them [e-mail] exit5 to help your business drive measurable growth. That's walkersans.com exit5.

[Dylan]

And then we started realizing that it's not just about Google anymore. It's about Google and Bing. And then we started realizing it's Firefox and it's DuckDuckGo and now it's ChatGPT ads. And we were seeing that tons of our traffic was just getting consumed by these AI platforms, and we were really struggling to beat 10% pure voice on Google, even with really dramatically increased budgets. So we just keep saying to our team that it's never been easier to generate demand. Programmatic is super cheap. CTV is super cheap to tap into. However, it's never been more difficult to capture that demand, especially when you're in a niche where you're competing with so many players who also have very mature teams and very mature tech stacks and budgets. So how do you do that? How do you be a little bit more strategic? I know I've only got a few seconds there, but I'll leave you on this cliffhanger. We increased our ChatGPT ADS experiment budget by 900% just after four weeks of results because we felt so strongly about this. And 100% of that budget came from shifting budget away from Google Ads. So I'll leave you on that cliffhanger. If you want to find out more about how ChatGPT ads work and about the strategy that we've been exploring for the last couple of weeks, vote for me and we'll go from there.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I dig it, Jess. I don't even use ChatGPT or Claude anymore. I'm back, and it's just straight up Google because Google just does all the AI chat right in there. And I'm like, this is a super interesting time to be a marketer. And Dylan just hit on that. Perfectly wild. All right, here we go. I'm sweating.

[Dylan]

It's going to be bad.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I'm nervous to walk out of this room and anyone's going to see, like, what the hell was that guy doing in there

[Jess Cook]

snapping?

[Dave Gerhardt]

And is that true? You did three demo? They never gave you the gift card? Who was it?

Olive Garden?

What was it for?

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

It is. I don't even remember what the gift card was actually for, but I remember it very vividly because I was out of town when I decided to do it and I was like, ooh, I don't want to pay for dinner tonight. So I'll get this gift card and I'll fund my my meal. It was with a video company. The guy was based out of Australia. And I was act like I did the pitch, it was good. And then I was like, oh yeah, I'm interested. So I did the three calls, but he never sent me a gift card. And I will never forget that. And I see his name come up on my LinkedIn every now and then, and that's just what I did.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We know who you are.

We know who you are, buddy. We know.

All right, let's go. Timer's up, producer.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Awesome. All right, so what a great intro for me to come over here and talk about Google AI and everything. So thanks, Dylan, for that. Definitely want to hear more about those ChatGPT ads too at some point, but. Hi guys, my name is Kenna. I do performance marketing at Easy Llama. We are a compliance and security training provider. So those courses that your HR leaders or IT people send you, that they stay on you to make sure that you do them and you just want to roll your eyes at them. We make those, but we make them fun and they do work. I actually enjoy taking them from time to time. So I'm going to talk about search today and if you know me, that must mean it's really working if I'm choosing that over doing something on talking about social. So as we know, Google AI overview has been getting bigger and bigger, especially in the last couple months. It's been hurting organic for a while now and now it's hurting our paid placements because they're just getting pushed further and further down. So if you're in Google Ads, you know that you get all these suggestions come up and you can just auto apply them. You can pick and choose. I've always been taught never to touch them. If you want to let your spend go everywhere and really get nothing for it, go for it. I do work with my Google Ad rep. I really enjoy working with her and she kept pushing me on doing this AI max and I was just like, nope, we're not going to do it right now. Maybe in the future, but not right now. And I finally agreed to it a few weeks ago but my rule with doing it was just don't hand over our ads to Google's algorithm. I don't want to blast our spend out of the water. Keep it close with high intent searches. So I finally turned it on for one of our campaigns to start. And I was very, very careful with it to make sure that it works and we can get into how to do it in the next round. But the engagement lift and qualified leads that we saw coming, demo increases, decrease in cpa and then of course, it's only been on for about three weeks now, but the pipeline generations already there. So I'm excited to see what it keeps doing as time goes on.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, hey, she got pushed off the cliff. Goodbye, Ken. It's great to see you. Thank you for coming. All right, Shlomo is the creative [e-mail] and he's ready. His girlfriend takes care of that plan for him.

[Shlomo]

I've already. That's true. But I take care of ads.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

[Shlomo]

Hey, guys. Hey, guys. I'm Shlomo and I make fun ads for boring tech products. Now, in the next two minutes, I'm going to show you a creative technique that I've been using a lot that I've learned from Apple originally. And it's called personification. So it's very simple. It's based on the question, what would happen if my prospect were a person? Right. Yeah. Like what kind of person would they be? And I want to show you how I use that for my client Hibog, which is NHR software like rippling or workday. And the first step in this recipe is to find an enemy, right? And in this case, our enemy is legacy HR software. Okay. Then the next step is to build your characters. So in this case, I used Apple as my inspiration and basically legacy HR software is this boring guy and hi Bob is the cool, handsome, popular HR software. And then the third step, finally is to pick a scenario. So in this case, I picked a soap opera breakup and let's see the ad.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

I'm leaving you.

[Shlomo]

You found something better.

[Jess Cook]

It's Bob.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Hi, Bob.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I knew it. What makes it better than me?

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

It's beautiful, smart, popular, and unlike you, it's not wasting my time. Start managing your HR payroll and finance all in one place.

[Shlomo]

This has been one of our best performing ads this year with more than 1000 leads. The leads are 80% cheaper than usual. The cost per thousand views is 50% cheaper. And if you pick me for the next one, I'm going to show you another bonus technique and the most underrated research tool and prompt for creative ads. Thank you.

[Jess Cook]

Speaking my language slow. I love ad creative happy place.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I just like when people show things like I'm a huge. I'm a huge show. You know, show me, show me the ad. Okay, let's bring them all up. Anthony, Dillon, Kenna and Shalomo to the stage please. Jess, I'm gonna let you, you know, you're my co host today. I'll let you take the first crack at questions here.

[Jess Cook]

Okay. I have one for Shlomo because I. Oh man, when I found out Shlomo was going to be on this, I literally think I slacked the Exit 5 team. Oh my God, I'm obsessed with him.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I thought you were just were saying that. I'm like, you actually know this guy?

[Jess Cook]

Oh my gosh.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Okay, you gotta check out his stop too much. You're biasing the audience.

[Jess Cook]

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Okay, Slow mo. Was that one of many like creative executions you did for the personification idea?

[Shlomo]

No, not necessarily in this case, like I use it for a lot of different clients, but when I do productions like this, then I usually pick five different directions, completely different techniques and angles, pain points and so on. And then we produce those. So for this campaign it was the only personification one.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Jess Cook]

Love it.

[Shlomo]

Thank you.

[Jess Cook]

Dave, would you like to ask a question?

[Dave Gerhardt]

No.

Why don't you do some of the work on this webinar?

[Stephanie (SurveyMonkey)]

Damn it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Not webinar. Live session. So question for Dylan. Talk about the ROI on those ChatGPT ads. That's a hot one in the chat right now.

[Dylan]

Hot in the chat, Yeah, I bet it is. Yeah. So our sales cycle is like six to nine months. So it's going to be a little bit of time before we start seeing that. But we have definitely seen some of the positive leading indicators that we look at in terms of click through rates. Can't share exact figures, but we've seen them be pretty comparable to non branded Google search in a lot of our cases. And we actually had two demos come in this week where last touch was ChatGPT. So we'll take it. Right, That's a good leading indicator. And obviously like we showed, we're running a pretty mature top of funnel strategy with a bunch of different programmatic display and LinkedIn Google. But I think a lot of that bottom of funnel search and middle of funnel search is now happening on ChatGPT and we definitely want to take advantage of that. Another cool thing we're looking at, we use a tool which is able to show some of our AEO sort of search results and with ChatGPT ads we can now see kind of what is our ownership of that share of voice of a specific prompt. And that's been really interesting. So we were able to plug in like some of our competitors and look at how much of the share do we own compared to them. That's been really interesting and part of the reason that we've invested so heavily in the platform.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That seems like a key piece for the future because it's, you know, who knows if you're gonna actually close the loop, but it's like, are we just. How do we know if we're showing up in these searches, in these prompts? Let's go to Anthony. I have some more for you. Dylan, a second. Some for Kenna.

[Human (Tatari)]

For Anthony.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Tell me more about this competitor takedown campaign. And then someone else said, I'd be curious to see revenue and spend.

[Anthony Blattner]

Yeah. So competitor conquesting, very common.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, the double C. Marissa would like to.

[Anthony Blattner]

You know, most software platforms probably already have. Your customers are already using some solution and your goal is to get them to switch over to your solution. So, number one, it starts with a targeting list that you're going to get so you can use lots of different data tools out there just to identify who's using these different platforms. You would build your target account lists based on competitors and then you would write your ad copy for those competitors. We do have a preview of a template on a later slide here. If you vote me back. Basically you want to show them how, in a message how your solution is going to be better and then you can work that into an incentivized campaign here. So you give them an incentive for taking that demo, seeing that in action, and then that's how it works.

[Jess Cook]

Love it. I have a question for Kenna.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Cool.

[Jess Cook]

From the audience. It says, kenna, how did you decide how much to put into AI max and pull from other spend? And did you notice any changes to organic as a result of investing in Aimax?

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Because it's only been on for a couple weeks and I focus so much on paid, I can't speak to the organic side of it directly. But from a budget standpoint, the way that it works in Google is it kind of, it is trusting the algorithm and it's putting your faith in it. So you turn it on and what your budget is set within that campaign, it decides if it's going to win the bid for the AI overview above the AI overview or stick it into a regular search area beneath it. So I just stayed with my normal daily budget, which is a very healthy daily budget behind it for this campaign. It's always been one of our highest performings. It started to kind of trail off. So that's why we went with that campaign to start it out with.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Okay, we're assuming this one is for Shalom o'.

Hare.

Fun ad does not necessarily make the lead reach out, especially the engineering type, icp. So this is fun, but maybe only for some audiences. But, you know, you work with a bunch of different companies.

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

Curious to hear how you handle that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Objection.

[Shlomo]

Yeah, for sure. I think the only thing you can do is start small and start testing it out and see if that works for you. For most of my clients, eventually we managed to crack it. And I think it always depends on how far you want to go and how interesting you want to make it. But in general, you're competing with the best content out there. You're competing with the best stuff out there. Why would it be boring? Even if it's for engineers, it could be technical, but it still should be fun, beautiful, interesting, should look like you put effort into creating that. Like you care. And I think that's the most important part. Not if it's fun or not, but just that you care.

[Dave Gerhardt]

There's almost always this. Things that we love internally end up not performing well and things that we didn't think are going to be the. You know, you just have to have enough ideas and then let the data tell you which one to go do more of. Jess, you got anything else before we roll the poll here?

[Jess Cook]

And we're one more question for maybe for both Dylan and Kenna, because I've never done these AI, like ChatGPT or AI ads before. How much control do you have over, like, what actually shows up? Because I know so much of that just kind of gets decided in the algorithm, like, what are you feeding it so that the thing you want it to say is actually what's said.

[Dylan]

I'll answer, I guess. For ChatGPT, we're also running some of Google's AI ads. Google, I would say, Kendo, you could back me up on this. But a little bit less control over what's shown to the customers. You kind of give them a bunch of approved assets and hope that they make the right decision. We do have one or two screenshots from a few upset people with some of the ad copy from that. At ChatGPT, you have a little bit more control. You've provided context hints, which are basically like prompts or keywords. You can think of it that way and then it will show specific ads depending on those keywords that you've given it. So you have a lot more control over what's shown to the customer. What's Also nice about ChatGPT ads is that it's only showing one ad per question from the customer. So instead of Google's overview where you may get a couple of different recommendations, ChatGPT is just allowing one advertiser per prompt response. So you have a little bit of like when it takes all advantage there.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Yeah. Add in for AI overview. The way that it really works though, I'll give away the secret to it that I was going to talk about later is that it reads the copy on your landing page to then determine what it's going to put in that ad. So you can, you know, it depends on how you're going to set up your page to be more conversion based, educational based, more content, less content, you know, whichever works best for you. And then just make sure that copy is, you know, any version of it would be okay to get pulled into it across the board.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, let's roll that poll. Who will it be? We have one winner from round one, moving on. We have one winner from round two. Moving on. And Dan is in my ear right now saying we're going to have a bonus, a wild card. There'll be a third person. And you know what? I got soundtrack this time after the night.

[Human (Tatari)]

Who is it?

[Dave Gerhardt]

They're gonna kick me out of here. How much more? I'm gonna keep it going.

[Human (Tatari)]

Love it.

[Anthony Blattner]

Okay, this is very close.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It's very close. Should we let Claude. Should we copy? Ask Claude vote. But there's also the interesting variable here, which is number of votes. So there's going to be a third person I want to bring back. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Side note, completely separate.

[Dylan]

Yeah.

[Human (Tatari)]

All right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Is it final? Where are we at?

[Shlomo]

All right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I think it is. Dylan, congratulations. Chat GPT on to the next round. Dan, who's the third Dylan winner? All caps winner. Way to go. Waiting to hear. And look, we're going to keep him up. It's 9:47 right now in his home. But Shlomo, you're going to have to keep staying up with us, brother, because you, you're the wild card.

So here we go.

Congratulations. Let's give a round. Let's bring everybody. I don't know if we could do that. Thank you for being here today. Great job, all you marketers. You're building a bunch of fans in the chat and you did a great job. So we're going to bring it back to the top. Are we going to go back to the top now? We're going to Jake.

All right, cool.

[Shlomo]

Nice.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Jake, you got those slides back and you got a little bit more time on the clock and we can get you back in there. All right, here we go. We got three minutes on the clock, we're off to the race.

[Jake Newby]

Okay, three minutes.

[Shlomo]

Okay.

[Human (Tatari)]

Yeah.

[Jake Newby]

So I said that I would talk about how we track signals for this play. So at a high level, this is the structure of how it works. We run the ad long form. Again, this is to a very defined target account list and one of the three titles that mean the most to us. It's usually Economic, Buyer and Champion. We use fiddler and LinkedIn to it which companies are engaging with that piece of content and then shout out vector on the click level. Once somebody clicks on that ad, we're using vector to de anonymize that contact. So we have a contact level as well. We're pushing all of that data into HubSpot. But anything that happens on a contact level, obviously we push to clay and then rich in clay and then push to HubSpot. So then in HubSpot, at a company level and at a contact level, we can score those leads based on all the engagement and then prioritize for different campaigns. We then segment those contacts and those companies into either different, warmer, retargeting audiences or it becomes a great list for our sales team to outbound to or to target that event social signals. So Clay, we're also tracking likes, comments, shares on that post itself. So we're getting that non click engagement, how the content structured. So basically at a high level, these are like the seven things we go through in this ad. One, we call it directly, like we speak to the prospect's specific situation. We're not talking like generically. We name their exact problem, their pain. We create an open loop in the beginning to give them a reason to keep watching. We establish expertise with data. So we talk about why somebody should listen to us. We show how you solve it, solve the problem that they're facing. We tie it to something that the prospect is evaluated on. So what usually like whoever our champion is, what they're bonused on or measured on is a really good one to form your content around and your use cases. And then we make the case for why our solution, our product, our brand is the only option. As you guys saw in some of the screenshots, it's an ugly ad. It's a nine plus minute video of somebody just talking directly to a screen. There's no fancy cuts. But if what you're saying is landing and it's hidden, you can keep someone for as long as you want watching video. So here's that framework applied in our ad. So one calls them out directly, top layer. We say this is where banks need to focus if they want to grow their S and P portfolio in 2026. We named the exact problem, which is banks struggle to get consistent qualified S and P demand that fits their credit cost. It's very specific. We establish authority. Again, this person says we opened with last year I spoke to a ton of banks and they're asking me three questions over and over. The open loop is he teases that he's going to answer all three and he's going to answer them by doing it in a new way they haven't heard of without adding additional risk. We show how to solve it. So then this is more like product focus. Like this is how our product solves those problems tied to what they're measured on. Our prospects are focused on are they funding more deals, are they funding them profitably and can they grow and retain deposits? So that's what we hammer on and then we make the case for lendio. We talk about how lendio is the only option out there that can solve three pain points that we talked about in this video compared to our competitors. And did you guys release the slides?

[Dave Gerhardt]

No, we're trying to get you off the stage.

You did great.

But we hit the cap.

[Jake Newby]

I'm done.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, you're done.

[Jake Newby]

It was so fast.

[Dylan]

That's great.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Did a great job. We're just trying to throw you off, trying to push you down there with Cana. Kind of catch him on the way down. All right, Dylan's back. Okay.

[Dylan]

Yeah, sorry about that. Interesting fun fact, while I'm flailing here, work laptops don't work for this channel, which was interesting. So my girlfriend's laptop is doing as we start.

[Dave Gerhardt]

What do you work for the government? You can't run a webinar platform apparently.

[Dylan]

Apparently. But guys, in any case, I'm not going to waste more time trying to share slides here. Like our big learnings and takeaways from this. Take it all with a pinch of salt. It's been eight weeks, right? So we have limited data that we're going off of. But our big kind of learning was that we were sort of reaching a point of diminishing returns within Google search and we'd found that we were over indexing on basically competitor conquesting and on a lot of these really long tail like kind of non branded search terms that had previously converted really well for us. We just weren't showing up for Those we weren't getting any impression share on them anymore. And I believe that that's because of Google's change to kind of AI overviews. So we've shifted some of our Google budgets to kind of adjust to that and take advantage of some of those AI overviews. But the other thing that we did do was start experimenting with a couple of different channels. And Dave, you gave this advice a couple of years ago and I've lived by it of like, you can't just pull out a brand new campaign out of your back pocket, pocket in Q4. You need to have kind of been building and experimenting, you know, months or years before. So about two years ago we started dedicating 20% of our ad budget to experimental channels. And with that we've discovered that meta ads convert really, really well for us. We found that Bing ads can convert pretty well for a certain group of users. And we also just kind of took this approach to we've tested now Reddit, we've tested Amazon Display and their connected TV app offering, we've tested LinkedIn, CTV. And when the opportunity came around to test ChatGPT, we were like, absolutely, we want to give this a go. And what we saw was that we were able to use our Google kind of keyword searches and use some of those volumes to inform what prompts we were putting in front of people. We were using Profound, which is an AEO tool, to see what kind of prompts were coming up and relevant to our audience. And then we were able to use that to create a bunch of different campaigns. So we found that just running one campaign at a time wasn't that effective. It made more sense to split out your hints into kind of themes and then be able to just give it as many possible hints so that it could match that to what a user was searching for. What was really, really interesting, we tested kind of top, middle and bottom of funnel style ads for the middle of funnel sort of education. That's really where we were finding we got the most value out of it. People were able to ask these really long winded questions and then we were able to show up as a really relevant solution to what they were needing. And we were seeing higher click through rates on that type of content.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I didn't realize what time it is. I like. All right, Shlomo, let's go rip it. We're going to do this, we're going to finish strong and we're going to crown a winner in the next four minutes.

[Shlomo]

All right, let's do it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Dylan Free Dylan, good job.

[Shlomo]

Welcome to Part two. So in a previous part, we talked about how personification can be a great hook. Instead of showing just another UI screen or an office, you could show real people and visual analogies is another amazing technique that I use all the time. Instead of just showing your boring feature, you find a fun analogy and, yeah, make an interesting ad. So here's how I did it for the hibob, my HR software client. First of all, I'm kind of a lazy marketer, so I don't want to come up with my analogies myself, so I let my users do it. And in this case, the first step is to find the voice of the customer. So I go to Reddit Answers, which is one of my favorite AI research tools. It's completely free. And I write this. Find posts and comments from HR managers sharing real challenges, frustrations and relatable situations. And one minute later, I get this beautiful report with a bunch of pain points, relevant forums and threads, and I start digging in and I find that everyone is talking about email back and forth, and some people are even calling it email. Ding pong. And ThinkPM is kind of interesting because it's a pretty cool visual that I can use. So this will be our analogy. Step two is writing the storyboard. Now, every story needs some tension. So in this case, we have on the left side, the employee. The employee just wants to take some time off, but the HR manager needs him to fill in all the forms manually because they're not using highball. All right, so how do we turn this tension into a storyboard? We're going to use the PAS formula, Problem, Agitation, Solution. So let's start with problem. The employee says, hello, I'd like to request time off. And then we see their email on the screen and then they start playing. The HR manager says, please complete the request form. And it goes on and on. And if the problem was just the beginning, in the agitation, it gets even worse. And then finally we get the solution and we get hibob, which solves all these problems. So this is my storyboard, and the production looked like this in the beginning. But here is the final ad.

[Jess Cook]

Hello, I'd like to request time off. Please complete the request form.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Which form exactly?

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

Employee absence authorization form B3.2.

[Alexander Goodwin]

Please find it attached.

[Jess Cook]

You appear to have missed section 4B.

[Unknown Participant (Audience Member)]

There's no section 4B on my copy.

[Jake Newby]

Yes. Guys, stop the ping.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Post with hi Bob. Requested and managing time off takes just a few clicks.

[Shlomo]

So this was our cheapest cpm, highest thumbstop rate and Also best hold rate. But yeah, anyway, like, good hold rate is not enough. So we also use these static ads for retargeting and they're performing pretty well. If you want these slides, add examples and research prompt, you can scan this link and I prepared everything for you in one notion page. Thank you guys.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Love it. We'll send it to you after.

[Dylan]

All right.

[Shlomo]

We did it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We did it. Here we go.

[Jake Newby]

This is it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So this is the final thing. This is the final event right here. Who's your winner? You can pick one winner. Is it Jake the long form explainers as LinkedIn ads? Is it Dylan the chatgpt guy with his girlfriend's laptop? Is it Shlomo? Product personification as ad creative or bonus? Do you just want to vote for Jess Cook? Overwhelming. Way to go, Shlomo.

[Dylan]

Good job.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Thank you to all of our presenters today. Thank you to Jess Cook and Vector for sponsoring this session. Shalom.

[Human (Tatari)]

Are you.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We're gonna send that. Dan, you're gonna find a way to get that trophy to Tel Aviv. Please do that. The check with Dave Gearhart, the Exit 5 swag. Thank you all. This was awesome. We're gonna keep doing this format again with different topics. I just want to give a shout out to all of the 10 folks that were with us today or eight of them or however many one. Like, this is awesome. This is what our whole thing is about. Real marketers sharing real examples. Jess Cook, great to see you. My friend. Shlomo, congratulations. Thank you very much. This guy's got 61, 000 followers on LinkedIn. I had no idea. There's no, you know, not lot of followers. Good at what he does. He's good at what he does. Great job. And then real quick, we love all the feedback here today, so please help us. How would you rate this session? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 0. If you give it anything less than a 3? I honestly think you're just being a hater because I. I'm not trying to skew the poll here, but like, you're probably just being a hater. This feedback is really helpful. Okay. That one guy just. It's always a guy. Got me with the one there. I probably talked myself into that one. But thank you for all this. We'll be back. Check us out exit5.com. We're going to send all the recap, follow up all this stuff out.

Shlomo, Jess, I'm out of here.

Thank you all. Way to go.

[Anthony Blattner]

Thank you so much.

[Jess Cook]

Bye bye.

[Dylan]

Goodbye.

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.

[Dave Gerhardt]

If you like this episode?

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

You know what? I'm not even going to ask you

[Dave Gerhardt]

to subscribe and leave a review because

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

I don't really care about that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

community for B2B marketers at exit 5 and you can go and check that out.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Instead of leaving a rating or review,

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

go check it out right now on our website exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your

[Dave Gerhardt]

career in B2B marketing.

And there's no better place to do

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day

[Dave Gerhardt]

asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers.

Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are

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so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest.

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[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

you over there in the community.

[Alexander Goodwin]

Foreign.

[Jess Cook]

Hey it's Dave.

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose built email and landing page platform and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week I spend a bunch of time more recently with Claude, my friend Claude as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So what happens?

[Unknown Participant (possibly a host or co-host)]

Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders an outlook, follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story the last mile still feels slow and manual NAC has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or Chat GPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building a knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing Ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket nac, MCP generates the email and a marketer refines and ships. This is the the Future of Marketing. You should go check it [e-mail] that's kn a k dot com.