Misadventures in Marketing

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 8 of Misadventures in Marketing: Name That Acronym - AI Edition! In this energetic Episode 8 of Misadventures in Marketing, hosts Steve Haney and Peter Farago shake things up with a special "AI Edition" of everyone’s favorite game show: Name That Tech Marketing Acronym! As always, the game puts Peter in the hot seat to test his savvy of the latest AI jargon in B2B mark...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 7 of Misadventures in Marketing: Agency vs. In House In Episode 7, Agency vs. In House, co-hosts Steve Haney and Peter Farago tackle a perennial dilemma for CMOs and marketing executives: when to partner with an external agency versus building an internal team. Drawing from their extensive backgrounds in high-tech startups, they break down the economics and decision-ma...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 6 of Misadventures in Marketing: Who’s Driving This Thing?! In Episode 6, Who’s Driving Thing?!, we take a deep dive on every CMO’s favorite daily worry: how to keep the company on brand in everything it does and every communication to the outside world it executes on. New tools are making it easier for marketing heads to manage this around visual identity and communic...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 5 of Misadventures in Marketing: Pitch, Please! In this episode, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney dive into the wonder of crafting compelling decks that persuade and engage your audience. We lay out our essential tips for creating impactful decks, graphics, messages, & animations, and explore the evolving role of generative AI in adding punch to all of them. We c...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 4 of Misadventures in Marketing: The New B2B Customer Journey In this episode, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney grapple with the age-old problem of product discovery and the new, convoluted, twisty B2B customer journey. Thanks to AI, prospects are armed with more data and more sophisticated information about the market landscape, your product and your competitors’ pr...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 3 of Misadventures in Marketing: Building a Web Agency That Lasts. In this episode, hosts Steve Haney and Peter Farago welcome guest Eric Weidner, a seasoned marketing professional who has built and run a successful web agency for the last 30 years. Traversing multiple technology waves since the internet boom of the 90’s, Eric shares his experience adapting to new busi...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 2 of Misadventures in Marketing: Channel Surfing! In this episode, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney share their insights on determining which marketing channels to exploit in the current online, vertical video, AI-driven environment we find ourselves in. After some intriguing banter about the government’s role in regulating AI, and exploring the intersection between...

Season 3 of Misadventures in Marketing is here! We kick off 2026 and Episode 1, Stage Ready, with a discussion about public speaking spots and how to integrate them into your marketing mix. Sure, I know you want to talk about AI and how PLG and SEO are going away and how in just 2 months every company on the planet is going to get side-swiped by our AI overlords. But after that’s all over and we’r...

Welcome to Episode 8 of Season 2 of Misadventures in Marketing: When Nobody Cares. In this episode Peter and Steve discuss the latest tech news, Canva's product launch and how we use their AI tools, and the evolving role of PR in tech marketing in the age of AI.  While large business and tech media outlets still command traffic and trust, and earned media and SEO remain valuable, the ROI of t...

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 7 of Misadventures in Marketing: Winning the AI Content Wars.  In this episode, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney discuss the challenges and strategies of content creation in a market flooded with AI-generated content; i.e. AI slop.  In a sense, we realize marketing teams have to fight fire with fire and use the AI tools we have at our disposal to increase o...

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 6 of Misadventures in Marketing: Board Tales: How to Win the Room.   In this episode, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney delve into how CMO’s should approach meetings with the Board of Directors.  Marketing execs get a small amount of time at board meetings to show what they're doing, exhibit progress, communicate blockers or issues in the marketing func...

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 5 of Misadventures in Marketing: Mind the Gap!  In this episode, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney delve into the critical aspects of lead generation and the sales pipeline, emphasizing the importance of aligning marketing and sales efforts so leads don’t fall through the gap between MQL and SQL. This is a more knuckled down conversation than we’ve had in the pas...

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 4 of Misadventures in Marketing! In this episode of Misadventures in Marketing, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney explore how the best laid marketing plans of mice and men and women often go awry. Or as the American boxer Mike Tyson puts it: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth! As marketing professionals in the rapidly changing world of technology,...

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 3 of Misadventures in Marketing!  This week, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney discuss the age old topic of Nets vs. Spears, but with a twist involving the new world of LLMs. How should an early or middle-stage tech start-up approach their lead gen investment versus their ABM investment when the AI bot scrappers are thrown into the mix?  Where do you focus,...

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 2 of Misadventures in Marketing!  This week, hosts Steve Haney and Peter Farago discuss the tectonic shift from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). They explore how consumer behavior is changing in the age of AI, the importance of content strategy, and the need for marketers to adapt to new metrics and marketing channels. Traditional search tr...

We’re back!  It’s Season 2 Ep 1 of Misadventures in Marketing!  In this episode of Misadventures in Marketing, hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney discuss their own use of AI tools in how they market.  Peter’s go-to chatbot is ChatGPT; Steve’s is Gemini. They explore the recent, rapid-fire developments in AI technology, the implications for job displacement, and the importance of con...

While on summer break, we came across a conversation we thought you'd find valuable and we didn't want to wait to share it. It’s a recent episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing – a podcast featuring conversations with top B2B tech media professionals. They've had on guests like Jon Fortt from CNBC, Don Clark from The New York Times, and Harry McCracken from Fast Company. The episode...

It’s Episode 15 of Misadventures in Marketing, our Season 1 finale!  And there was no better way to wrap up the first leg of our journey than interviewing music industry big shot Julianne Bornales. As an 18 year veteran of the industry at Warner Music Group, JulieAnn has marketed through one of the most breathtaking eras in the music industry.  Throughout that time, she had to traverse m...

In Episode 14 of Misadventures in Marketing, your inquisitive hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney discuss the ongoing tension between investing in short-term versus long-term marketing activities. They explore the tensions marketing leaders face in balancing immediate lead generation demands with the need for sustainable brand activities that grow the business long term. Studies have shown that com...

In Episode 13 of Misadventures in Marketing, your noble hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney delve into the intricacies of lead funnels, particularly in the context of B2B SaaS and technology startups. We discuss the customer journey, the importance of understanding decision-making processes, how you determine the stages of the lead funnel, how to define an MQL, when a lead becomes an MQL, and why a...

We’ve made it to Episode 12 of Misadventures in Marketing, the tech marketing podcast that not only tastes great, but fills your mind with tech marketing’s most provocative issues. Take, for example, this episode in which hosts Peter Farago and Steve Haney delve into the challenges of marketing products that haven’t quite found product-market fit. We discuss the concept of 'magical thinking'...

In this, the 11th episode of Misadventures in Marketing, hosts Peter Farago & Steve Haney proudly present the first game show edition of Misadventures in Marketing. Steve quizzes Peter on the myriad acronyms in tech marketing (which, oddly, are almost all three letters). Peter gets extra points for accurately defining the term that the acronym represents. Suffice it to say, our...

In this, the 10th episode of Misadventures in Marketing, Peter Farago and Steve Haney welcome Melissa Grimshaw-Vargas to the podcast. Melissa heads up Launchwise, a brand consulting practice in San Francisco that conducts brand launches and leads in-house executive brand initiatives for both consumer and B2B companies. She’s also VP of Partnerships for the American Marketing Association...

In this, the 9th episode of Misadventures in Marketing, Peter Farago and Steve Haney discuss the role of reference customers in B2B tech marketing, emphasizing the importance of how they can help prospects build trust and credibility in a new start-up. They explore the nuances of corporate culture, the challenges of creating effective case studies, and the dynamics of sales relationships when it c...

In this, the 8th episode of the Misadventures in Marketing podcast, Peter Farago and Steve Haney discuss how they have used public relations (PR) in their high-tech marketing mix. They explore the evolution of PR strategies, the importance of understanding earned, paid, and owned media, and the current challenges of making this demand generation channel worth it in today’s world of coporate-driven...