Changing Brand Perception with Kim Storin, CMO of Zoom

Summary

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The Marketing Architects: Changing Brand Perception with Kim Storin, CMO of Zoom

Release Date: May 19, 2026
Guest: Kim Storin (Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Zoom)
Hosts: Lena Jasper, Angela Voss, Rob DeMars

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Episode Overview

This episode features Kim Storin, CMO of Zoom, in a deep-dive discussion about the challenges of evolving a brand once it has achieved near-ubiquitous awareness. The panel explores moving beyond being “top of mind” for a single use case to building broader mental availability, the shift from classic funnel models to new modes of B2B buyer behavior (the "dark funnel" and "zero-click" world), leveraging category creation, balancing brand and demand metrics, and the evolving role of AI in discovery and brand engagement.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Double-Edged Sword of Near-Universal Brand Awareness

[04:06]–[06:44]

• Kim Storin: Zoom enjoys 99% brand awareness—”a CMO dream on paper.”
  • The challenge: Zoom is universally known, but for one thing only—video conferencing.
  • ”We are constantly top of mind, but very much underrepresented in too many buying situations.” (Kim, [04:22])
• There’s an opportunity—and necessity—to broaden Zoom’s relevance beyond meetings into areas like customer support, webinars, recruiting, and AI-powered workflows.
• The aim is to expand Zoom’s role in customers’ minds, not reinvent the brand.

Measuring Brand Health in a Multi-Product, Multi-Audience World

[06:44]–[08:56]

• Previously, Zoom’s brand health tracking only measured its primary (meeting) use case and IT decision-makers.
• Kim explains the need for a new measurement framework:
  • ”We had to reinvent our entire brand health approach...we're actually selling to different buying groups.” (Kim, [07:25])
  • New dashboards now capture perceptions from customer support buyers, marketing leaders, talent leaders, etc., to identify gaps and track progress.
• Growth now comes primarily from new buying cohorts.

Integrating Brand & Pipeline – “Brand to Demand”

[08:56]–[11:29]

• Kim’s philosophy: “I don’t talk about brand, I don’t talk about demand—I talk about brand to demand.”
  • Strong brand investments drive efficiency and effectiveness in pipeline and downstream demand generation.
  • Vanity metrics (like traffic) matter, but true impact is seen in pipeline quality and efficiency.
• The traditional funnel is “dead”—buyers now do as much as 80% of their research independently (“dark funnel”).
  • Success is about being present in conversations and relevant channels long before buyers contact sales.

Adapting to the "Dark Funnel" and a "Zero-Click" World

[11:29]–[14:50]

• The “dark funnel” is all buyer research, conversations, and formation of preference that happen outside of any trackable touchpoints.
• Kim on channel mix selection in this environment:
  • ”Reddit matters more than ever. LinkedIn matters more than ever. Word of mouth and review sites...are changing the mix.” ([12:50])
  • Paid media still important, but genuine influence now comes primarily from earned and owned channels and voices (authenticity).
• Planning for a future where much discovery happens via LLMs (Large Language Models), with buyers making shortlists based on a handful of recommendations.

Building Category Entry Points – "System of Action"

[15:45]–[19:52]

• Kim describes a deliberate effort to craft and communicate a new category narrative (“system of action”) for Zoom, in partnership with the CFO.
  • This spans both internal and external conversations and integrates AI capabilities as a core differentiator.
  • ”We started by building a category, which is a system of action...And being able to clearly articulate that as a category...was a new muscle for the company.” (Kim, [16:12])
• Example: The “Take Back Lunch” campaign, which connects Zoom’s AI features to reducing work friction, freeing up time, and enabling work-life balance.
  • Even fun, social-led campaigns are tightly tied to this new category narrative.

Humor & Humanity in Brand Campaigns

[19:52]–[23:53]

• The creative strategy for the “Zoom Ahead” (Zoom’s new launch) campaign:
  • Described as “Dead Poets Society meets Severance.”
  • Written by Colin Jost (SNL) and starring Bowen Yang; blends humor and relatability.
  • “Reach matters, repetition matters, credibility matters.” (Kim, [20:27])
• Kim’s insight: Humor works for B2B if it’s true to the brand’s voice and grounded in product reality, not forced.
  • “We hit the right intersection of heart, humanity, and humor with an element of product truth.” ([23:35])

The Role of AI in the Buyer Journey & Marketing Strategy

[24:21]–[28:34]

• Zoom is aggressively building AI natively into its product suite, with features like AI Notes.
  • “The future of AI is part of what we’re building...embedded AI is our core differentiator.” ([24:56])
• AI is changing how buyers form their shortlists: “They’re not searching; they’re asking.”
• Now, it’s as important to “market to agents” (LLMs) as to humans:
  • Investing in content, rewriting FAQs, maximizing references and citations across the web.
  • Press releases, review platform engagement, influencer and expert social strategies all matter more.
• Authenticity is key: “They don’t want AI slop anymore. They want to see real humans and have real human connection.” ([27:48])

Practical Examples and Brand Alignment

[28:34]–[33:11]

• Hosts appreciated Zoom’s visible experimentation and leadership—especially as AI, channel management, and new category messaging demand agile approaches.
• Kim stresses not to attempt brand humor in-house: “That’s why you gotta call somebody like Colin, because if you try to take that on yourself, you’ll probably fail.” ([29:11])
• Authenticity is a recurring theme for both brand (Zoom) and Kim’s personal style.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We are constantly top of mind, but very much underrepresented in too many buying situations.”
  — Kim Storin ([04:22])

• “Our growth really comes when we are thought of in other moments than [video conferencing].”
  — Kim Storin ([04:45])

• “We had to reinvent our entire brand health approach...we’re actually selling to different buying groups.”
  — Kim Storin ([07:25])

• “I don’t talk about brand, I don’t talk about demand—I talk about brand to demand. … Effectiveness comes from having a really strong baseline at the top of the funnel.”
  — Kim Storin ([09:29])

• “The funnel’s dead. We all know this.”
  — Kim Storin ([10:56])

• “So much of the work that we’re doing now [is] in the dark funnel, what I would call like preference formation.”
  — Kim Storin ([11:12])

• “Reddit matters more than ever. LinkedIn matters more than ever. ... The authenticity that comes from those third parties... is really changing the mix.”
  — Kim Storin ([12:50])

• “We started by building a category, which is a system of action...was a new muscle for the company.”
  — Kim Storin ([16:12])

• “We hit the right intersection of heart, humanity, and humor with an element of product truth.”
  — Kim Storin ([23:35])

• “If you try to take [humor] on yourself, you’ll probably fail.”
  — Kim Storin ([29:11])

• “What you see is what you get...I tell how it is. And it’s a little bit of the Texan in me.”
  — Kim Storin ([29:36])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro/main challenge: [04:06]
• Brand health measurement evolution: [06:44]
• Tying brand to pipeline ("brand to demand"): [08:56]
• Dark funnel & channel mix: [11:29]
• Category entry points/system of action: [15:45]
• Humor in campaigns (“Zoom Ahead”): [19:52]
• Role of AI & LLMs in discovery and marketing content: [24:21]
• Personal/brand authenticity, closing reflections: [29:36]

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Additional Memorable Moments

• Kim’s marathon and dog-naming stories (Bixby the marathon dog) add personal color and underscore her theme of authenticity. [01:39–03:11]
• Fun discussion about team members’ personal myths and a humorous Dawson’s Creek anecdote. [31:09–32:46]

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Conclusion

This episode provides an in-depth look at transforming brand perception when awareness is nearly maxed out, the shift toward multi-product and multi-buyer measurement, the imperative of tying brand directly to demand, and the central role of authenticity and relevance in an age of “dark funnels” and AI-driven journeys. Kim Storin’s insights are practical for any B2B marketing leader facing similar perception and growth challenges.

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Transcript

[A]

Now that people want to do 80% of the research on their own before they talk to a brand, we need to make sure that we're part of those conversations and part of the channels where they're having those conversations and getting that word of mouth and being there and being present. And so ultimately, when they are ready to build their shortlist and all of a sudden you pop up on the shortlist because all of that work is now happening without the brand involvement, those investments really matter because the role of demand is really changing. Marketing Architects.

[B]

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Lena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect at Misfits and Machines.

[C]

Hello.

[D]

Hey, guys.

[B]

And we have a guest today, Kim Storen. Kim is the chief marketing and Communications Officer at Zoom. Before Zoom, she was the CMO at Zio Group, where she built the marketing function from the ground up. She's also led brand turnarounds at IBM, where she delivered seven consecutive quarters of revenue growth, and at amd, where she laid the groundwork for a new brand strategy that fueled massive stock gains. She started her career in M and A consulting at Deloitte. So excited to have her on the show. Thanks for joining us, Kim.

[A]

Yeah, I saw AMD just hit like $300. I'm like, we won't even talk about. It was like a $2 stock back in the day.

[C]

Well, Kim, word on the street is you're also like, the chief marathon officer. You did, like, 14 marathons.

[A]

I haven't run one since 2019, so I'm having a little bit of an identity crisis of. Can I still call myself a long distance runner if 13 miles is kind of my longest distance?

[D]

I've been busy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yes. It's fun. It's my, like, stress relief.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Curious. Kim, what was your favorite marathon? Just for my own curiosity.

[A]

I don't have her anymore. Let her rest in peace. But I did at the time. I named my dog after the halfway point in the Big Sur marathon because I loved it so much and it was just so beautiful. Which was the Bixby Canyon Bridge. And Bixby's no longer with us. But she. She was my little marathon dog for a long time.

[B]

Fun. Did you take her on runs and stuff?

[A]

Yeah, she would do like 10 to 13, sometimes even more miles.

[D]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah. That's great. I'm just starting to Run with my dog. I'm trying to train her up right now. Randomly she'll see she's a bird dog, so randomly she'll see a duck or a sparrow and just completely pull me off the trail. So I'm trying to work on focus.

[A]

My. My dog now, Zora, is very similar to that. So you're like 90% of the time she's a great runner and she'll do up to about eight or nine. And then every once in a while, like you, you feel like your arm gets pulled out of the socket.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So not as. Not as disciplined.

[B]

Yeah, Fun. Alrighty. Well, I'm going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. And for this episode I chose a classic article from Byron Sharp. This one's called Mental Availability is not Awareness. Brand salience is not awareness. And just first defining some terms here. Mental availability is the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize or think of your brand in a buying situation. And it's not the same thing as awareness. A buyer can be completely aware that your brand exists, but still have no useful memory structures attached to it. Jenny Romanick calls that empty awareness. What actually drives purchase isn't whether people know your name. It's the quality and quantity of the associations linked to your brand, the situations, the needs, the reasons to buy that come to mind when someone is actually making a decision. So a brand could have really high awareness scores and still not be showing up in all the moments that matter for them. And we have a guest today who is familiar with this sort of challenge. So, Kim, thanks again for joining. As everybody probably inherently knows, we all know Zoom. You probably hear this all the time, but our company uses Zoom. We're big fans, we're one of the first corporate customers. And I think it's safe to say Zoom doesn't have a brand awareness challenge. So what is the challenge? What is the challenge you're trying to solve as cmo and how did you diagnose it when you first joined Zoom?

[A]

So I would say we do have a brand awareness challenge, but not in the way that you would think. Right. Which is that it is a double edged sword. We have 99% brand awareness. So for a CMO, that sounds really great on paper. Right? You have this huge awareness opportunity. But what it really means when your business is known for one thing and one thing only, that becomes a double edged sword. And so that is, I mean, to the point you just raised in terms of the research. Right. We are constantly top of mind, but we are very much underrepresented in too many buying situations and people don't necessarily understand the breadth and depth of the portfolio. And so we're always top of mind for meetings and, you know, for video conferencing. But for us, growth really comes when we are thought of in other moments than that. Right. When it comes to customer support or your marketing revenue workflow, like a webinar or a recruiting workflow, really AI powered workflows. And we're not often top of mind. Even though we've got great products that meet the needs of those unique line of business and functional leaders, we're still typically thought of as a video conferencing platform. And so we're really trying to get out of being known for just that one use case. And when I started just about a year ago, it was pretty clear in the data that we did not have an awareness problem. I Talked to about 50 customers in the month before I joined the company just to get a sense of where customers thought we had opportunities and how they were viewing us. And it was also pretty clear from those conversations that we didn't have a preference problem. Right. It was not a situation where you're just used because you're there. Like it was truly we had this great preference and awareness. But then when you started to peel back the onion and look at the breadth and the depth of the portfolio and the fact that even people that are customers of other places in the portfolio, like we have CX customer support customers that still don't see us as a customer support platform. And so that really became like our opportunity not really to reinvent the brand so much, but really instead to expand where we're relevant in the customer's mind and that's ultimately what will drive our growth.

[B]

That's such an interesting challenge. I think when we talk to a lot of brands that are getting into sort of the brand marketing journey, they're so focused on their awareness metrics, their aided and unaided awareness and moving those over time. When those high level metrics aren't really telling you what you need to know. Since you're already so high, how does your measurement framework work? What does it look like for the goals you're trying to achieve?

[A]

So it started with, you know, our brand health was really only looking at the use case that we were already well positioned in and it was only looking at the buyers that are looking at that one use case. And so ultimately we had to reinvent our entire brand health approach because for the expanded portfolio we're actually selling to different buying Groups. Right. This is not a traditional. We're adding to the portfolio and the IT decision maker is going to. Now they have so much recognition of how great the brand is with the meetings platform that they're now going to add X, Y and Z. Really, our growth is coming from selling into new cohorts of buyers. So that completely changed how we had to measure the brand. And we're just starting to set that baseline of what does a customer support buyer think about zoom? Where are we in, like, their top of mind? And how is a marketing leader thinking about zoom when they're evaluating webinar platforms or a talent leader when they're evaluating a recruiting platform? And previously we weren't looking at any of that brand's health. And so that's really where we've started to set the baseline, recognizing that this is a different buying group. Yes, there is some perception shift that we have to do within it. Absolutely. But the real growth is happening with new customers and new cohorts. And so that's our big shift. And our dashboard looks very different than what it did a year ago when I came on board in terms of what we are measuring and what we saw as like, brand salience in the IT framework. Very different than as we look across those other cohorts.

[B]

So it's almost like before you're running like one big brand health survey and now you're like slicing and dicing more those different audiences. Yeah. One thing I was curious about is there's always this balance CMOs need to have between brand and pipeline. And it probably shouldn't be seen as so separate. It probably should be seen as together. But I've heard you talk a lot in interviews about the brand work you're doing and raising your perception. How have you been able to connect that to immediate pipeline or balance the two when you come in as a new cmo? And I know both goals are very important and tied together. So how have you told that story?

[A]

I think they are inherently tied together. So even the way that I message it is I talk about it as brand demand. I don't talk about brand, I don't talk about demand. I talk about brand to demand. Because if you really think about your demand, efficiency and effectiveness comes from having a really strong baseline at the top of the funnel. And so what we've started to see, like, obviously we just launched our brand campaign at the very end of the year, so December 31st, and so we're only four months in at this point. But what we're starting to see is all of those great vanity metrics like traffic, et cetera, that we want to be seeing engagement with the brand. But even more importantly, we're starting to see our pipeline really be more efficient and effective. And all of that work that's happening at the demand level is now connected to the work that we're doing at the brand level in a way that it wasn't before. And that's really helping us. We're hitting those metrics now out of the park, where we were really struggling on that before. And it's because we weren't investing enough in the top of the funnel. And again, like, I mean, the funnel's dead. We all know this. So I say top of the funnel as just a way to kind of clarify where those investments go. But with so much of the work that we're doing now being in the dark funnel, what I would call like preference formation versus kind of awareness and consideration, which is how we used to talk about it. But now that people want to do 80% of the research on their own before they talk to a brand, we need to make sure that we're part of those conversations and part of the channels where they're having those conversations and getting that word of mouth and being there and being present. And so ultimately, when they are ready to build their short list and all of a sudden you pop up on the shortlist because all of that work is now happening without the brand involvement, those investments really matter because the role of demand is really changing 100%.

[D]

I want to double click into dark funnel just in case we have listeners that are hearing that term for the first time. It's just that portion of the buyer journey that happens outside of any trackable marketing touch points. Right. The research, the conversations, preference formation that might occur before a prospect ever raises their hand or enters your CRM. And it can be hard. You know, you're speaking into that, needing to market into a process that you can see. I'm curious, how do you choose your channel mix when that's going on or when the goal is perception change rather than just driving awareness or direct response can. Given the fact that so much of this might occur in something that you can't see happening from a trackability standpoint in the way we look at data today?

[A]

Yeah. So I think it is a very different mindset. And when you start to think about the fact that we're moving to a zero click world and in B2B, which is a lot of where zoom plays. Right. Yes. We have a lot of freemium users. But when you think about our core business is a B2B business at the heart of it, and B2B more than B2C is starting their journey on LLM. And I've seen numbers everywhere, from 50% to 80% depending on who's providing those numbers. And that starts to show you where you need to be showing up, right? And that means that things like your citation strategy really matters now. Reddit matters more than ever. LinkedIn matters more than ever. And word of mouth and review sites and it's really changing the mix, right? And we have to look at owned and earned very differently and like paid still plays a role, don't get me wrong, but I do believe that people are more skeptical now and the authenticity that comes from those third parties, those review sites, the media, and even the owned channels like LinkedIn and Reddit, right? Those are not brands. Those are people like humans, connecting and sharing their stories of your company, of your products, of their experience with your customer support team, what have you. And so as we look as a B2B brand and moving to this potentially zero click world pretty quickly, it's all of those elements of the mix that I think we had so, you know, so much focused on kind of the pay to play of paid media. And I do think that we're going to see more and more of the importance of having that broad reach in a advertising strategy coupled with a really strategic mix on the earned and the owned side that will kind of change the game for how we're seeing all of this performance marketing really perform when people are not going through a traditional funnel with a, you know, typical website traffic as the next step. So that mix is really shifting 100%.

[D]

We've talked about how the potential of a zero click world to actually make the marketing world and industry just more effective in general. It's simple. We need to be where our potential consumers are. But it forces us to let go of some of the data on the last click that we may have been addicted to and pushes us into a world in which we have to really subscribe to a belief system. And I love that that's what we're here to talk about every week. You had mentioned earlier the need to be thought of in other moments beyond video conferencing. And we have you on the podcast today, you're a marketing effectiveness student and apply many of these principles at Zoom. So I'm curious, as you think about that need, are you doing any work around category entry points to just try to build that mental availability in Those key moments, absolutely.

[A]

I think it really starts with the work that we've done. And I partnered with our CFO, which is not always the number one partner for marketing, but my dad is an ex CFO, and I've been reconciling receipts since I was 10 years old. So I always gravitate toward the CFO cohort there. Because obviously owning the message to investors is just as critical at a public company as owning the message to customers and partners and analysts, et cetera. And so we partnered on even just starting to articulate the category that we play in. And that narrative was really missing, especially as we had acquired companies and built new products that clearly are adjacent to our video conferencing heritage, but not necessarily crystal clear externally of how it all fits together. And so we started by building a category, which is a system of action. And it's effectively the conversations that you have inside of an organization through your meetings, through your engagement platform, and then the conversations you're having outside of your organization, whether that's with customers, prospects, candidates, investors, et cetera. And then the core conversation to completion, kind of the embedded AI that flows across those conversations. And being able to clearly articulate that as a category and how Zoom is differentiated to win in that category was a new muscle for the company. And we had been more focused on the product level architecture, if you will, of how do all our products fit together versus how do we tell this holistic story and how do we enter a new category and broaden the concept of the category that we play in? It starts to shift the narrative from Zoom's, the video conference platform to Zoom is building a system of action which opens a whole different level of conversation with customers and investors and analysts and partners, et cetera. And so that's been a pretty big piece of work. And then we've been able to, on top of that, like, obviously, that is a foundational piece of work that had to happen. It's not a marketing message, it is a category message. And that's a really big distinction for folks. And so then how do you take that concept of system of action and turn that into a message that actually resonates with customers? And you think about our campaign that we recently just launched called Take Back Lunch. I don't know if you had a chance to see this work, but really creative and basically anchored in research that, you know, showed us that people have not been taking lunch and that we were able to connect the dots that if you use Zoom's AI embedded platform within our suite of tools you can save the time in a day to actually take lunch. And how those tools remove friction from your day, enable you to be able to be prepared, be able to take notes, be able to schedule and manage follow ups in a way that actually reduces that friction. And so those stories and those campaigns, while folks might not really understand the difference between category and marketing message, you can see that even though it was a fun social stunt and we had Saturday Night Live folks there and influencers there, and it was just really fun and stunt, like it's still anchored on the idea that we are a system of action and we're working in a different way, not just as a video platform. So it's those moments and trying to recreate the foundation the that we just didn't have to tell our stories differently.

[C]

Let's talk about some more fun here because I really enjoyed watching your commercial for your Zoom Ahead launch. You've described the commercial as dead poet society meets severance and like totally mailed it. Colin Joss I mean, what a great writer to have pen the campaign and to have Bowen star in it. What a fun spot. Tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that, how you guys got to the strategy that you guys have. You've already talked about the results of it. I'd love to hear the thinking behind it.

[A]

Yeah. So I mean, ultimately we knew that we needed to do something big. Reach matters, repetition matters, credibility matters. And so we wanted to figure out in this campaign how we bring those things to life. So it was a pretty broad scale campaign. We showed up in a lot of kind of really cultural moments everywhere from the college football championship to the Grammys to the Olympics and more. So ultimately, like I said, I Talked to like 50 customers and I had this hypothesis walking in that that people prefer Zoom, that it's easy to use, but that preference doesn't always translate, especially in the enterprise. And, and I saw, I went down these rabbit holes on Reddit and, and social media and talking to people and people love this platform like I had never seen. Similar to how we started this call, this podcast, right? Was on the concep forbid you have to do a demo on teams, right? And so that preference was really resonating and I started to look at our CSAT scores and it was true, like that the preference was really grounded in data. And so we wanted to be able to show the world like as part of that credibility that people love this product, they prefer this product and for it, decision makers, like that's leverage for you, right? Having a Product and a tool and a solution inside of your stack that people love and really want to use and can remove friction from their day, especially when you embed the AI capabilities in there. And so we took this challenge to the team at no Notes, which is Collins firm.

[C]

Is his firm located on the Staten island ferry that he bought maybe some

[A]

days, because I think it's a small team, so you never know where they're going to be. We really wanted to bring some heart and humanity. We looked at what the competition was doing, and we felt like there was an opening. We are part of the cultural zeitgeist, and a lot of that is organic. You can join, you know, or watch people's podcasts. Like, you know, Alex Cooper, she met her significant other on Zoom. Or, you know, you listen to Amy Poehler and she's starting her podcast on Zoom, and you just see this, like, cultural zeitgeist around the brand. You know, last year at the WebEx conference, Ryan Reynolds is on stage age and said five times how he zooms, right? So you. You get all of this, like, organic preference. And so we wanted to build a campaign that tapped into that and that we felt like humor was a place where we could be owning that. That style and that tone. And we felt like it was natural to our brand. It didn't feel forced like some other B2B companies who shall remain nameless, who have tried humor and have maybe not been successful. And Colin and his team took on the challenge. They did a great job of really embodying the voice of the brand, the voice of the users, and bringing a sense of humor that didn't feel forced. And it felt like we hit the right intersection of heart, humanity, and humor with an element of product truth. So it really did feel like we were able to build an iconic statement in that commercial that I think a lot of brands maybe don't have permission to do in the same way.

[C]

When you guys really tapped into, I think you said at the beginning of this, though, it's like people do take video conferencing seriously, even though it's not a serious topic. But, like, I get mad if I get invited to a teens meet, right? So that's emotional to me. Yet it's video conferences. So I think that commercial did just an amazing job of tapping into that emotion but not taking itself too seriously all at the same time, which is hard to do.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely.

[C]

Speaking of another fun topic, let's hit on AI for a minute. I love getting a software update from Zoom because it seems like you guys are always giving new gifts every time. And the AI integration into it is continuing to be top tier. How does that impact all the LLNs and the AI driven search? How does that seem to be changing the B2B buyer journey? And does that really factor in how you guys think about where Zoom needs to show up?

[A]

Oh, absolutely. Obviously, to your point, we are an AI company. We're building AI into our products. We just launched an AI Notes product. It's embedded into the product, it's not bolted on. And we, we use. Right. We eat our own dog food, we use our own products. And so we are big believers in the future of AI. And the future of AI is part of what we're building. And again, as a system of action, that embedded AI is our core differentiator, along with the conversations that happen on Zoom. And so we definitely started thinking very early on, just because of the world that we're living in as a company around AI, of, of how AI is reshaping the B2B buyer journey. And similar to what I was talking about a little while earlier is that we are seeing that more and more B2B decisions are starting on an LLM, and that more and more B2B decision makers don't want to talk to a brand until they're putting you on the short list. Basically, if you think about the discovery shift, like, people used to be searching and now they're asking, and so they're not evaluating that long list, they're really getting right away to a small set of recommendations and a short list. And that raises the bar for everybody. Now you have to be much more credible, you have to be much more consistent, and you have to be widely referenced to show up in the answers that the LLMs are giving around your brand. So our focus has really shifted as well to make sure that we are showing up and being represented accurately across the LLM ecosystem. That means we're investing in content, we are rewriting content, we are adding more FAQs. Like, we actually are thinking about how we market to humans, of course, but also to agents. And that really changes how you write a press release. Press releases are hot. Again, it means how do you engage with the review platforms? How are you driving the analyst coverage? How are you thinking about leveraging influencers and expert voices? Where do you have an executive social strategy? Because executive voices matter more now in terms of citation than brand voices. And so it's really changed the way we think about authenticity and credibility in a different way. And you're seeing that kind of play out like obviously on the AI front and how we're thinking about showing up in those now, I don't want to call it search, but now asking environments. But you're also seeing that authenticity play out in how people, once you're on the short list, how they want to engage with you and they don't want AI slop anymore. They want to see real humans and have real human connection. And I think that's why our ad really paid off. It felt like a human story based in a human truth with a product truth that elevated to it. People want to be involved in experiential events now. They want to hear from people that work in the organization versus the brand. And so whether it is the credibility driving through the discovery process or the authenticity and credibility that needs to happen once you're on the short list, you're seeing that theme really come through right now. And people are, they're leveraging AI more and more. But on the flip side, like they don't want to see AI generated slop all the time.

[B]

Yeah. I appreciate you giving examples of how you're addressing some of the AEO challenges like press releases and FAQs and because as of B2B marketer myself, it can be so overwhelming. It feels like the recommendations change is not the same as SEO, but we're doing some similar things. I'm always like, oh, okay, good. That's good that a brand like Zoom is doing that too. This has been wonderful. I love all these topics. I love how plugged in you are to marketing effectiveness, especially at a B2B brand, which I think is not quite as common. Love brand demand use of humor. I was reading some research the other day about how humor driven campaigns are much more likely to be effective, but it's hard to get it right.

[A]

That's why you gotta call somebody like Colin, because if you try to take that on yourself, you'll probably fail.

[B]

No, you wouldn't want to hire me for that. The dark Funnel brand health metrics. It's just been, it's been wonderful talking to you. I wanted to wrap up with something kind of fun on the same theme of perception we've been talking about today. What is something that people consistently get wrong about you when they first meet you?

[A]

So this is a cop out answer, but I think it kind of ties into this concept of authenticity and credibility with me. Like what you see is what you get. And so I think people are often surprised. Like I don't put on too much of a veneer and I Tell how it is. And it's a little bit of, you know, the Texan in me. I don't live on either coast. I don't live in the that world, although I've been there. I lived in New York, I lived in San Francisco. But I am a Texan through and through. And I think that authenticity has mattered to us. Texans really embrace authenticity. And so I think people can kind of read me like an open book. I don't have a good poker face.

[B]

No, that's nice.

[A]

I need to figure out how to have people getting something wrong about me, but usually they can read me like a book.

[B]

Yeah, that's funny because we're also not on the coast. We're Minnesota. But I think Minnesota has more of that, like, Minnesota, nice vibe.

[C]

We're very passive aggressive.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah, we could probably learn from Texas in that way, but. And Rob, did you have any ideas for this one? I know this was a hard one to think of.

[D]

This was a hard one. I said that to Elena yesterday when we were prepping for this. But I love social settings in very limited scope. I think that people assume that I'm more social than I actually am. I have jomo instead of fomo. I go to bed at 8pm routinely. I really like small, little controlled environments of social activity. Fill my little cup up, it's really small. And then I can get out and go home and unplug.

[B]

What about you, Rob?

[C]

I happen to be a dude, so people think that I somehow might even remotely want to watch professional sports. The truth is I know way more about New Girl than I do about New York Yankees. So I am. I just have no, no interest in talking professional sports. But do you want to talk Dawson's Creek? I'm your guy. I was at the dentist two weeks ago. Dennis walks in, trying to make small talk. So what. What sports you like watching? And I'm just like, wrong guy. Sorry, I'm.

[A]

Are you Team Dawson or Team Pacey? That's the real question.

[C]

Oh, Dawson for sure.

[A]

All right, I. I did meet James Vanderbeek. He was in a sushi restaurant the night before July 4th, like two years ago. And of course, we're the only people in the restaurant. And I'm like, staring at him and his family and my husband's German and he has no understanding. And I was like, my high school friend text thread is going to go crazy for this. And so I, you know, my husband went to the car, I went and interrupted and was like, will you take a photo with me? So I have this great photo of. Of me and Dawson, and at the end of it, I said to him, I was always Team Dawson. And he laughed. And then I got in the car and I said to my husband, I had to lie to him. I was so team facing. But I just felt like, you know, I needed to, like, give him something for. For taking that photo and letting me interrupt his family dinner.

[C]

Of course you're going to be team Dosser in that moment.

[B]

Are you kidding?

[C]

For sure. It's awesome.

[B]

Well, mine is that I'm pretty tall. I'm six feet tall and people always ask me if I played basketball. I get it. At least a couple times a year. Did not play basketball. Not good at basketball. I tried. Angela actually played basketball in college. Angela's a bit taller than me, but yeah, I always get that. And I prefer, like, endurance non contact sports. I don't want to have to deal with other people. Just leave me alone. Go in a straight line. That's what I happen to prefer.

[D]

Yep, that for sure is out there if we're tall. Kim, we're a Microsoft shop, as I know millions of others are. And even with teams bundled in, we make the decision around Zoom for a lot of reasons related to product quality and the work you and your team are doing. So well done.

[A]

Well, try out the Notes feature if you haven't yet.

[B]

Yeah, yep, I see that pop up.

[C]

The cloud connector has been a game changer too.

[A]

I love it. Yeah, it's all part of the ecosystem now. I love it.

[B]

All right, thank you so much for joining us, Kim. That was fun.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing

[A]

architects.