The Campaign | A Marketing Podcast by 97th Floor

AI has made it easier than ever to flood the market with content, and that's exactly the problem. Rachel Neppes, who manages Alliance Marketing and PR for Targus, makes the case that credibility is now the only real differentiator in a world where audiences can feel the difference between authentic storytelling and generated noise. In this conversation, she breaks down how brands build credibility...

Most people know they should be using AI more. Almost nobody knows how to actually get there. Pete Larkin, GTM engineer, AI builder, and host of the AI Deep Dive podcast, has done the unglamorous work of figuring it out through time-blocked late nights, robotics projects with his kids, and a family operating system he's building to become a better father and spouse. In this conversation, Pete and...

Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his career researching the science of why people say yes, and his seven principles of influence have become the backbone of how the world's best marketers, salespeople, and leaders communicate. In this conversation, he shares where marketers consistently misapply his research, how AI is making the line between influence and manipulation harder to hold, and what the sc...

As cookies disappear, AI search obscures organic traffic, and paid media consumes a growing share of marketing budgets, attribution has never been more complex—or more consequential. Ted Coxworth, President of Extensor,, has been building Media Mix Models since 2013, and in this episode he breaks down why most measurement stacks are quietly leading marketers into an expensive trap. Ted walks throu...

AI search doesn't work like classic SEO. Kevin Indig breaks down the new pipeline brands need to win in AI search: getting retrieved, getting cited, and getting trusted. He and Paxton dig into why citations don't guarantee mentions, why original data still beats everything else, and why the old click funnel no longer tells you what's working. Key takeaways: Retrieved isn't cited: Being crawled by...

The attribution model marketers have relied on for years was never as reliable as we wanted to believe. Sam Brown, VP of Strategy at 97th Floor, makes the case that the zero-click era isn't just changing how we measure marketing, it's forcing us to finally do marketing the right way. In this conversation, Sam breaks down why the obsession with credit and channel-specific metrics has made marketers...

Blake Nielson sits down with Head of Content Rachel Bascom and Enterprise Account Director Jasmin Bennett to break down how the team at 97th Floor has moved from AI chatbots to agentic AI workflows, and what that shift has meant for content quality, efficiency, and process design. Key Takeaways: Agents act. Chatbots talk. That gap is where most teams get stuck. Break your process into small skills...

David Meerman Scott coined newsjacking, wrote the book that redefined B2B marketing, and had a Hollywood film based on his work. Now he's back with a clear take on what AI actually changes and what it doesn't for marketers who want to stay relevant. In this conversation, David ranks AI against the content revolution he helped spark in the 90s, explains why the middle layer of marketing is disappea...

Most people know they should be building a personal brand, but they're stuck. Brandon Smithwrick, content strategist and founder of the newsletter Content to Commas, didn't study marketing, didn't have a roadmap, and didn't go viral overnight. What he did have was a fashion student's competitive instinct and a relentless obsession with figuring out what makes content actually work. In this convers...

Google I/O just dropped a wave of search announcements,  and the implications for marketers are massive. In this episode, Paxton Gray sits down with 97th Floor's Head of Search, Mike Witham and Head of Content, Rachel Bascom to break down what's actually changing. From AI-powered personalized results to agentic search that browses and buys on behalf of users, they cover what these shifts mean for...

Wikipedia became one of the most visited websites on earth without ads, VC money, or a top-down editorial team. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, joins the show to share what actually built that, and why the lessons apply far beyond a nonprofit encyclopedia. Key takeaways: The accidental innovation advantage: The dot-com crash left Wikipedia with no money...

Personas have earned a bad reputation in B2B marketing—and for good reason. Most sit unused on hard drives, filled with irrelevant demographic data like "married with two kids, drives a Volvo." Ardath Albee, author of Digital Relevance and a pioneer in buyer persona development since 2000, explains why most personas fail and what actually makes them work. Key takeaways for marketing leaders: Why 1...

When Whitney joined Gorilla Logic a year ago, she inherited a team facing the same pressure every marketing organization feels right now: prove you're using AI or fall behind. But instead of chasing efficiency metrics, Whitney asked a harder question: "If we can't definitively say why it's making progress and showing up better and making incremental change that helps the bottom line, why are we do...

Organic traffic is down. Click-through rates are dropping. And every marketer is panicking about whether their SEO strategy is dead. Mike Witham and Blake Nielson from 97th Floor's AI Task Force are here to set the record straight: 80% of what worked in SEO still works for AI search—but that 20% difference is critical. In this tactical breakdown, Mike and Blake share what they're seeing across doz...

What does it take to build groundbreaking companies across three decades of tech evolution? Daniel Nissan, founder of Structured (formerly Structured Web), made the first internet phone call in 1993, launched the first nationwide grocery delivery service before Amazon, and is now rebuilding his 26-year-old platform from for the AI era. In this episode, Daniel shares hard-won lessons from the front...

Most B2B marketers are stuck playing it safe, following "best practices" that guarantee mediocre results. Udi Ledergor, former CMO of Gong and author of Courageous Marketing , has spent his career doing the opposite—running Super Bowl ads for 5% of the expected cost, getting Times Square billboards for $500, and building a marketing machine that made Gong impossible to ignore. In this conversation...

Most early-stage startups fail at the same place: they can't figure out marketing. Sterling Snow, former CMO at Divvy (acquired for $2.5B), has cracked the code on what actually works when you're searching for your first scalable channel—and it's not what the playbooks tell you. Sterling calls it "the haystack phase"—that brutal early period where you're testing everything, burning through budget,...

The Apple-Gemini announcement changed everything—but not in the way most people think. Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO, explains why this partnership doesn't signal the death of SEO but rather Google's complete dominance over search for the foreseeable future. In this wide-ranging conversation, Eli challenges nearly every assumption marketers hold about SEO in 2026. From why your thin cont...

With AI making it easier than ever to launch startups, B2B SaaS companies are facing an unprecedented wave of competition. Bill Macaitis, former CMO of Slack and Zendesk, shares exactly what marketers need to do in 2026 to not just survive—but dominate. Bill brings decades of experience taking companies from startup to IPO, and his perspective on what's coming is both sobering and energizing. The...

While everyone's talking about AI, very few are actually making it work. Marie Haynes, renowned SEO expert and AI experimentalist, is one of the rare practitioners who's gone beyond the hype—building 50+ custom AI tools (gems), testing workflows daily, and learning what actually ships versus what crashes and burns. In this candid conversation, Marie shares the unglamorous reality of AI implementat...

A staggering 41% of marketers admit they don't do audience research nearly enough, and over half do it very infrequently. In this conversation, SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin breaks down why audience research has become marketing's orphaned responsibility and what it's costing companies in missed opportunities. From Fortune 500s sitting on unused data to marketers relying on ChatGPT for audienc...

Matt Frisbee went from Disney performer to marketing executive, and is one of the best storytellers around. In this conversation, Matt breaks down the art of storytelling in marketing, shares how he built breakthrough campaigns at Little Giant Ladder Systems, and explains why "feeling understood is the sexiest feeling in the universe." This is a masterclass in taking calculated risks, doing the de...

Most B2B marketers are missing a goldmine of audience insights hiding in plain sight. While everyone flocks to LinkedIn, 68% of Reddit users aren't even on the platform—meaning there's a massive chunk of your audience having authentic conversations about their real problems elsewhere. Deep tech CMO Kiersten Gaffney has cracked the code on mining Reddit for content that actually converts. In this e...

Most marketers think they know their audience — but they stop at surface-level demographics and wonder why their campaigns plateau. In this conversation, Rachel Bascom and Paxton Gray break down what it really means to be audience-first, why the “big research lift” mindset is holding you back, and how to turn existing knowledge into exponential results over time. If you’ve ever felt stuck in the “...

CMOs are more optimistic about AI than ever—yet many organizations are still stuck at the starting line. In this episode, Aby Varma, founder of Spark Novus, joins us to share how marketing leaders can move from AI curiosity to meaningful adoption. Drawing on real-world examples from Fortune 500 companies, Aby reveals why asking “Can AI do this?” is the wrong place to start, how to build a strategy...