How to Use AI for Content Without Creating Slop with Eoin Clancy (VP Growth at Airops)

Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by Agentic AI. I wanna be the person on my team who actually knows how to build with AI, not just talk about it, not just use Claude to ask silly questions, but I want real output, something I can point to and say, I built that and it saved my team hours every week. If you wanna be that person, check out this resource. The team at Optimizely is super smart in this area. They've developed a new AI marketing certification called Opal U. It's a 5-day live course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI. This is a structured hands-on program with just 1 hour a day for 5 days where you'll build 3 real AI agents that saves 10 hours a week. Plus you're gonna learn 5 prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output. How to feed your agents the right context so they write and think like you, how to connect them to real data sources so they're pulling from what actually matters to your business. And you'll do all of this alongside 50 other senior marketing leaders just like you dealing with the same challenges. And at the end, you'll present what you built, get feedback, see what others created, and leave with 10 new ideas for what to build next. Plus, 20% of Opal U graduates have gotten a promotion or a new job after completing this. That's pretty cool. So now's the time. Check it out. Opal U kicks off every Monday. You can apply right now. Optimizely.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact-level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at 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. And they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude and ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and Vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to vector.co to learn more. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. And if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them Exit Five, please.

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You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.

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Hey, it's Dave. So we just hired our first content engineer at Exit 5. Shout out to Marissa. And this conversation with Owen Clancy is a big part of why. Owen is VP of Growth at AirOps. We recorded this session a little while back and it still holds up now because we get into what a content engineer actually is and why you might need one, 3 ways to know if something is AI slop or not and what the bar for good content looks like these days, and Why AirOps best growth channel in 2026 is not something crazy. It's webinars, good old webinars, 14 webinars in a quarter, ungated with a follow-up system built in Clay and SmartLead that drives real revenue. We go deep on that webinar playbook, how they pick topics, how they source guests, how they track attribution and follow up without being annoying about it. So if you're trying to figure out how to use AI to move faster without tanking your content quality, this one is worth your time. And I love webinars.

So.

I'm excited about this one. Enjoy my conversation with Owen. Owen, good to have you on the pod.

Yeah, glad to be here, Dave.

We were joking because we've done a bunch of stuff together and Dan always messages me. He's like, we should have Owen on the pod, and like for 6 months. And I'm like, yeah dude, we have it, it's scheduled, it's happening, and it's happening right now. And I took a screenshot to throw it into Slack to prove it. So we're going to get into a bunch of— AirOps is a cool company in a cool space, and we're going to talk about bunch of stuff that you're doing in marketing that's working, what's not working, opinions on marketing. People have been really liking the, like, let's talk about what marketers are actually doing. Let's get away from the, like, oh, so what'd you do before this and before that? Like, they want to talk about right now. I want this to be a podcast that people listen to and take stuff away from. But before we do that, briefly tell me about AirOps. What does the company do? Why is it interesting? And, uh, what's it been like doing marketing in this AI and SEO/content space, which is really hot right now?

It's so fun. I come from having marketed or doing growth, uh, in a different space towards software engineers for the last 6 years. And that, man, that was tough. That like, that drains you. It's an audience that's like hard to get in front of. So AirOps is a content engineering platform. We're in a super hot space at the moment. Everyone is trying to generate content to get their brand seen in AI search and also seen in SEO. So we help leading companies like Carta, Chime, and a lot more, um, like basically increase their brand visibility. So we can get into, uh, later, Dave, like what's the difference between AI slop and what you guys do. I know that's like definitely top of mind for everyone, but we're there to help, um, team basically increase their brand visibility in organic search.

Okay, so you mentioned AirOps is helping to solve the problem of getting found in AI search, which is something everyone's asking about right now. You also mentioned something about content engineering. Explain that term to me.

Yeah, that is a term that we'd like to say that we've like championed ourselves. And HubSpot had their version of like the, the growth marketer. You've Clay who do like the GTM engineer. For us, it was very hard to find who is like the person that like owns or runs AROPS internally. So we actually like played around with the, the word choice or like the title for a long time. But a content engineer today, given we have 12 months of lots of learnings and probably, I think in the last 6 months we've seen like 80 people hired into content engineering roles at a range of our customers and prospects. But a content engineer is someone who really starts to manage your context internally and also builds and maintains your workflows. So when we talk as well about like avoiding AI slop, It all comes down to what you're feeding a model with or like what you're educating yourself on in terms of the context that feeds into your content. So content engineer helps gather and make that data available, and they're also building the workflows that help you produce the content.

And does the content— would the content engineer be responsible for the website content, or is it like the blog, like content marketing efforts? Because This has been coming up. It's like now that I need to have my website content formatted in a different way and there needs to be specific files and this and that, then I need to make sure my content is readable for LLMs and humans. Like, does product marketing own the website or demand gen? Where does it fit with content engineer?

I think it very much depends on like the size of an organization. So the larger you go, your product marketer is probably going to maintain your product solutions, use case pages because they're lower amounts of copy, they're higher density in terms of just like speak talking to the user, and we're starting to see more content engineers progress from the more strategic performance-focused content up towards that. So I think like Carta is a good example. So Lucy Hoyle, she's like our champion over there. She started off on managing their blog content. Now she's moved in.

Is her title like content engineer? She's a content engineer at Carta?

Correct. Yeah. She moved from like a content strategist into, I think now she's like a senior content engineer. So it's great to see people get promoted in the role as well. But yeah, she's moved a lot of the performance-related content. So as you said, Dave Gerhardt, like on the blog or larger programmatic hubs, and she's now focused on a lot of the strategic content. So she is now starting to craft workflows that go into thought leadership content and I think starting to touch some of the product pages. And again, as we think about the higher quality content, whether it is a landing page which has far fewer words than a longer blog post, You're still generally trying to solve the same problem. You're trying to find what is it that is unique to your business? Like, how does your product like situate itself in the market? And then how do you describe that best to a human or an agent that is like visiting this asset that lives on your website?

I like that distinction because I still feel like I, I think AI SEO stuff is cool. There's a lot of changes. The more— and I'm not certainly not an expert, as you know, I'm just a thought leader. I just interview people for a living. But almost everybody that I've talked to, like, if I were to like make— it sounds a lot like what, what it was, you know, 10 years ago, like, hey, let's make sure this content is like searchable and indexable and is useful for Google. It's kind of the same thing now, but it's for LLMs, and they have a different way of doing that. That might be my layman's terms of explaining that, but is that any beef with that?

None whatsoever. There's one book I come back to every 12 months by Eli Schwartz. It's called Product-Led SEO. And I think Eli wrote that in about 2016. So you're talking way pre-ChatGPT, you're talking before even like people also answer elements in Google Search. But a lot of the core principles he talks about as to how to invest in a strong like SEO motion Who's Eli Schwartz, by the way? Eli Schwartz led SEO at big companies like Toast and like many other big B2C companies where their whole growth motion was SEO. So his, his kind of like MO is like answer users' questions with the content that you produce. So all of the companies he's worked with will say greater than 30% of their acquisitions will come from organic. But his core principle in the book, again, written a decade ago, I guess at this point, was The search engines, their whole motivation is to surface the best content for any given query. And whether that search, like, engine is like Bing or Google or ChatGPT or Perplexity, they're trying to get to ground truth. They're trying to like answer the question they get in with the best piece of content or now it's like a larger answer. So the, like, no matter what sort of content you're trying to create, like you always need to draw it back to like what a user's focused on. And then what are the questions that they have that might be unanswered? That's largely like where your opportunity is. So I think given the space is like changing the whole time, it still comes back to you have a human who needs to find an answer and you need to provide that answer.

I love when you can find something like that in a sea of like, my God, I saw a tweet from Brian Halligan this morning who's a former CEO and founder of HubSpot, and he's like, and he's, you know, at Sequoia. Top investor in the space looking at the hottest AI companies is like, is anyone— it was something like, does anyone else feel like overwhelmed? Like they can't keep up? And I'm like, oh, that made me feel better because I have had this insane feeling of like, I am just a muggle who uses ChatGPT, you know? And it's like, my feed is like just these insane workflows and all these things. And I'm like, God, I feel so far behind. I just love when you hear something like that. A book that came out, you know, 10 years ago where the principles remain nice.

Yeah, I think the one of the things I do when I try and like select a book is it's the Lindy effect, it's called, but a book becomes more valuable the longer it's been around. So you should always return to like the classics because they're a classic for a given reason. Like they're not going to keep coming up in conversations or being mentioned unless they're good. So basically the longer something is around, the more authoritative and likely long-lasting than it is.

Okay, so you're in this space at AirOps, you're going after this persona of content engineer, which there are a lot of— we do marketers, we do like to make up names and terms. And I love when people roll their eyes on this because like, no, no, no, buddy, that's like actually the job. It's like you should make these things up. That's, that's part of the marketing job. Like if you're getting paid to be a marketer at a company, like, yeah, we're going to try to call it content engineer. But it turns out like This is working, it sticks, and it's one of the things that makes sense to me. Like, this role makes sense. I, a couple marketing teams ago, like, we would want to be hiring like a growth person in marketing, or a— we called it, we hired someone who was like a former PM and we called her like marketing engineer. There has always been, or, you know, Clay has the GTM engineer. What you're talking about is applying this specifically to content. And I've long believed that out of all the things in marketing, content is arguably the most important thing in marketing. So why not apply an engineer to, to that and learn a lot about AI and what it's gonna take to rank for SEO? I, I think it's, it's an interesting play, but we don't wanna just talk all about content engineers. We're gonna talk about a bunch of the specific things you all have done at AirOps that seem to be working. Can you just set the stage, by the way, before we talk about, hey, here's all these great marketing plays that you run, can you just Can you give me some receipts, credibility? You don't have to— you're a private company, so probably you're not going to tell me AirOps revenue on air, but give me some sense. Let's tell people that like, hey, this, this is working, the company's growing, and then we'll talk about the marketing stuff that you've done.

Yeah, 100%. So when I joined the company about 18 months ago, I came in as a former customer. I was actually a customer for 12 months. So I joined what was then like a 15-person company. Solo marketer. We were very much like PLG focused, trying to go like bottoms up, like self-serve because like while it was a content automation platform, it was generalized automation as well. You could use AirOps and still—

That was your, that was your, the company you were at for people who might not know, that was the company you were at before this, Wylet?

Well, I joined AirOps when we were more like a PLG, like we were self-serve.

Okay. While it was a PLG. Got it.

Got it. Yes, correct. And then, yeah, I was a solo marketer, which means you do everything for about like 5 or 6 months. And then as we started to like think about my job as like head of growth is to figure out the channels and the tactics that can drive basically pipeline or acquisition for us. So basically we started to see a lot more value with dealing with bigger companies. It gave us better product direction. It gave us just better signal because these people are like knee deep in the problems that we wanted to go and solve. So taking the first 6 months of like finding our feet, setting up some channels, the last 12 months, that was 2025. We've basically like 10x'd our revenue and then like 10x'd our customer count as well. And in that time, we've gone from SMB-focused to really like enterprise. So again, it's been—

Don't tell us all this time. It's literally every company ever. Dan and I were just talking about this because We're feeling it in our business. It's like it always happens this way.

It's incredible.

Follow the money.

Yeah. Like along the way though, it is the same set of problems that marketers are facing and people are at different stages of their journey of like understanding and adoption. So like you were like being negative to yourself, Dave, of like you just used ChatGPT, but I think you're still ahead of probably like 50% of marketers.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Go for it. I use Claude Cowork, motherfucker.

Okay, you're ahead of the curve.

I am a growth— I'm a vibe engineer myself. So yeah, I said ChatGPT because I didn't want to make anybody feel inadequate, but I'm using Gemini, I'm using ChatGPT, I'm using Claude Cowork. Like, take that, influencers.

So you're top 10% then.

Yeah.

And I think, um, Generally, like as people move in, move into that early adopter phase, or now I guess it's like middle, the median person or median, like content marketer is starting to like realize that this is something they need to move with. That's where we've kind of like found our sweet spot within organizations where they're getting hit by like SEO not being as important, but also just like the essence of brand being incredibly important as you get into a Nanobanana or like comms or PR, just how you can leverage the tools to move fast or move faster, but keep your quality really high. That's like the main challenge that a marketer is facing today. Everyone's asking them to move faster. Hey, you've all these tools, why can't we launch faster? Why can't we do more content? But they need to keep the balance of like quality very, very high. I think that that's where we're really trying to address their, their situation.

Yeah, so I have— so one of the topics was going to be fighting AI slop. This is a natural transition to there. So maybe we'll talk, we'll talk about webinars, talk about some other stuff you've done, but maybe let's, let's talk about this. Is this kind of what, what you're getting at, which is like, we want to use the AI tools to create our content, however, that V1, the uniqueness, the, the utility, the cool factor of it has kind of gone away, and it's like You can't just use it to create, you know, silly little memes or just kind of like, hey, wow. Like I remember 3 years ago, I was like, wow, like ChatGPT wrote me this, you know, email that would have taken me, you know, 20 minutes before. But how do you articulate the, we don't do AI slop, but we use AI. Why do you think that? Why do you think those 2 things get mixed together? Why do people say like, oh, you're using AI to create your content?

You know, that's evil. Yeah. I think it's. We've been on like a journey, I think, like as, as a marketing group where when this tool came out, like you said, it just like gave you instant access to like content generation. So be it an email or a memo or a blog post, you could like give it literally like a sentence of like, write me a blog on X, and it could come out with as many words as you want, which is like the best thing and also the worst thing. So Google was like kind of caught flat-footed with some of like ChatGPT's releases. So you could put out that undifferentiated content and you'd actually get quite good results. So I think between ChatGPT coming out, maybe the next 6 months, people were like, how do I throw more gas on this fire? Because you could create hundreds of pages and actually get results. But again, the thing I love about Eli Schwartz's book is like those pages were not serving user intent, like they were just slop. And I think there's some people today where they're still on that practice and it's not driving results. And then they're very vocal where they're like, hey, I'm using AI, I'm like seemingly like producing output, but it's not driving results. Like it doesn't work. And I think sometimes they get to dominate the conversation, but it all comes back to like is what you're producing actually useful? Does anyone want to go read it? And is it really— I think what we believe in is it pushing the conversation forward.

The reason I like this topic is because it's like, that's the fun part about marketing to me. I'm not an engineer, so the fun part is not like, how do I produce 100 pages, 100 landing pages at the snap of my fingers? Where my bias is more like, how do we tell a story that stands out? How do we get attention, right? How do we create something worth reading? And then ultimately, if someone reads something and it's good and helpful, I don't get to the end of that article and I'm like, oh, this was totally written by AI. I'm like, oh cool, I got the answer that I was looking for. Like, you know, like totally is the post. I need to go to the post office after this. Like, this is a silly consumer example. Like, is the post office open at 4 o'clock? Like, I got the answer. Am I like, damn it, AI gave me the answer. Slop, you know? Yeah, it doesn't matter.

I think, um, one of the things I've been like stewing on is—

please—

what are the 3 biggest indicators of something being AI slop? Oh, what do you got?

Give me what—

what is— yeah, you can avoid it. Okay, I think number 1—

here's a clip. This producer Aaron, let's make that— let's make this a clip. Here, here are 3 ways, 3 ways to know if the content is AI slop.

Number 1, I think not unique. It's not pushing the conversation forward. Like in our term, it's not like information gain. Like it's not using your internal experts. It's not going into look at Reddit questions or like questions are coming up on like your Gong calls. Like you're not leveraging that really unique information that you have. You're instead just like scraping what's on the top 2 pages of Google, repurposing it and churning it back out again. So I think where you're not unique, that's AI slop. And number 2, and this matters more on like a per-brand level, but like the content doesn't sound like you, I think it's also near the slop side as well. And there's certain brands that always stand out to me that are like edgy. So like Intercom or Clay. Clay's a great example. It's always like a fun brand, like their social persona should actually come through when you're like reading a customer story or a piece of content from them. You want, like, they as like a marketing team want it to sound like them, but you also enjoy reading Clay's content because like it has like a certain vibe. So if it doesn't match that, if it doesn't sound like you, I think as well it's in the lower quality bucket. And then there's the smaller telltales, and this is like what will come up in a LinkedIn post or like a YouTube video, or college professor is probably like shouting at their students every day, but like the em dashes, just like the— those other words like utilize instead of use, just these phrases that we actually don't use in everyday vocabulary. I think that as well as just like, uh, there are like telltale signs there, but it's not that that is a significant indicator of low quality. Some people do use those words, but it's not in like your daily vocabulary. And one of the most important things to actually create performant content is like the readability of it. Like, the LLM still has to like digest all of this. A human has to engage with it. Like it needs to be like easy to read. So write for a 5th grader or like write for your elementary school like audience and it actually performs better.

So I was just before this, I had a doctor's appointment and I was asking something, obviously sharing all my, you know, private information with Gemini because like, who cares? Whatever, right? Hey, like I'm dying. How do you fix it? And it, it exactly the headline that one of the tells is like the way they do like the subheads and kind of like recap things. And so it's like the conflict, why one isn't another. And then they explain one section, the hack to stop the frustration. Then the third one was like the last paragraph. It's like recapping it all, the reality check. Like it's almost like it's too like robotic. And it is one of those weird things. I also think there's something with humans. Those are great, by the way. Love the list of 3. I wanna get back to the, um, the, the tone of voice thing in a second. But I think there's something, I'm noticing this in my kids now who are young. They know when I show them a video, they're like, oh, that's AI. I'm like, how do you know? Ah, it just feels, it just has a way. And I know people love the AI voice recorders. We have one, we have a DaveBot, which is trained on my voice. It doesn't trick me 100%. Maybe we're going to pass this. Someone's listening in their car right now who's super deep in AI and there's like, just wait, Dave, 6 months. The fraud is the spam and the fraud is going to be through the roof, but there's definitely something there on the feel. And it's like, I don't know, this is— people love the term taste, but it's kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of like, how do you know when something is handmade, right? Like the difference between like a local restaurant, you're in Chicago, amazing food. The difference between a pizza in Chicago, right, from a proper place versus going to say California Pizza Kitchen, more of like a big chain, is it's going to be noticeable. You mentioned tone of voice. I want to talk about that. Because how does someone— this is a thing, I've been feeling this, but how do you define that? A lot of companies, it just kind of happens. There's a writer who's there early and that kind of has their voice. Are you seeing customers or even you all like trying to have a tone of voice so that then you can use AI within that framework and it works versus if you let AI dictate your tone of voice? Any, any advice there?

Yeah, this is like one of the toughest parts and like almost taking a step back to answer the question people often ask, like, is AI going to replace a marketer? And like, the answer is like undoubtedly in my head, no, because that is like a key question that is like so hard to evaluate. And like, we've tried to create like frameworks that can help companies basically determine if the end output is similar to their tone of voice input. And it's like a hard problem to solve. Like, it's not as if you can do an engineering sprint and like go and solve it. But taking like 2 or 3 examples of like customers, I think the, the big thing that comes out when we like nail a workflow with them is that from their content marketer or their like head of product marketing, they just come to us with, it's the recurring sentence of this just sounds like us. And that's like a super hard thing to go and measure, but it really comes from like the hybrid situation. Like if you just try and use like AI out of the box and you mentioned Claude Code, Dave, I spent my entire weekend in it. So I was trying to like hack it in all the ways to see like how far I could push it, like the hybrid situation is really where you end up with like higher quality, but there are some important inputs. The inputs are going to be your product context, and then you have like brand style guides, and then you, you do have like a tone of voice that really like you can probably put into a one-pager. And I think that does need to be a key asset that you spend a lot of time on. But the interesting thing, what a lot of our customers do, or when prospects come to us, they've actually done this themselves. They use AI to help generate that for them. So like they're gonna have not been using AI for the last 3, 4, however many years they're in business, but they've created a lot of content that they're proud of. It performs really well. It's reflective of maybe their like leadership team voice, or maybe their like brand team has like a different quirk to them. So with these tools that are available, you can almost like capture the essence by synthesizing the content you have out there into these key documents, and then that just gives you a much better foundation to go and build on. But it's almost like the human element, to answer your question of, it's really hard to figure out what is tone of voice, but there are ways that you can create these assets and that gives you just a better starting point. But you do need to continue to refine your systems over time because like a product set, your tone of voice is going to change depending on your state of the company, the state of the market, and wider things. So it's an evolving asset. So you wanna make sure that humans are very much like kept in that loop.

I also like, you've talked about this, but basically how important subject matter expertise is in your content. And it's challenging because there are gonna be people that listen to this and not everyone at every point in your career or even right now is gonna be at a company where you're like, man, we have so much unique IP. Like there are a lot of marketers, like we gotta just be real, we're just like doing marketing at a company and the company's kind of like, Meh, you know? But I think this is important to still state because this, this shows what it takes to be great. And especially if you're looking for a new company, you know, looking for a new job, looking at a new company, can I go do marketing where I feel like— this is why I wrote the book Founder Brand as an example. My point was like, that's the best ingredient for me as a marketer, is like, if I find out that the founder of this company has a super interesting backstory and like started this company because they had some deep pain or problem before, which is usually the case— most founders aren't like, you know what I want to do? I want to get super rich, and so I'm going to start a company. It's like, oh no, from tech companies down to like the snacks in my pantry. You know, you open the pantry and it's like, uh, I was tired of feeding my kids, you know, sugary drinks, and so I created blank. And it's like everyone has a story. And so the more it seems like, especially in this era, the more subject matter expertise and IP around the problem that you're solving for your customer, that's also going to be a key ingredient in how successful you can be with content.

Indeed. What I'll say is with all of the tools we have access to, even if maybe you're like, founding team isn't the most like extroverted, or it's like hard to pull those like key stories out. There's like many other places you can go to knowing what I know now, how I would have approached content differently at my last company is like, interview like engineers every day of the week, because they're like the ones often solving the problems at like 1 AM, 2 AM, and they like realize the, the actual day in the life of like our customer. And there's like such nuance there. And again, we always used to do the end of quarter like content analysis at the last company. Everything that like stood out with like traffic numbers or on-time page engagement were the most technical pieces we created. And they were like a struggle to do. It was like super hard to like sit down with an engineer for like an hour, ask them like informed questions, and then afterwards use your best kind of like understanding of the problem to write it up. Now that can turn into like, hey Dave, like, use your phone when you're out on a walk, record this voice note, send it to me. I'll like use AI to enrich it, come back to you with a draft. We can like, like improve the whole process. That whole end like work stream is much easier now, but you can often find people inside of the building who can give you that key context. And even if still that's not available, ask your customers, or better still, listen into the conversations they had with your sales team. And again, that is the richest golden context you could be using for developing your content or just like honing in what— if you're trying to find product market fit, honing in on how you should position yourself to these people.

Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at CustomerIO are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push, and they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought, and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI, and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically, but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what CustomerIO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now, not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out Customer.io. It's customer.io/exit5. Go and check 'em out. Customer.io/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Look, I want to tell you about DRIVE 2026. This is our annual event we do for the ExitFive community. It's a 2-day B2B marketing conference in Stowe, Vermont. We built it for marketers who want to get smarter and actually connect with their peers. This isn't a generic industry conference. It's a small, intentionally designed event where the programming, the venue, and the schedule all work together to create the conditions for real conversations. Attendees spend 2 days getting into the tactical details of B2B marketing, what's working, what's not, and how the best teams are thinking about the problems that actually matter. This is all about workshops, sessions, and discussions that are built around participation, not passive listening. I want you to actually come and be there. If you're going to take the time to leave your family, leave the office, get outside of work, like actually be here, take notes, pay attention. It makes it all worth it. And here's the thing though, the B2B marketing stuff, that's what's going to get you to justify the ROI on your ticket. That's why you're going to be able to tell your boss that you want to go to this, but the best moments at DRIVE don't happen on stage. They happen at breakfast, on an afternoon hike, over a drink. After dinner, right? Somebody's gonna be roasting marshmallows at this place. It's that type of event. We designed this for, um, for disconnection. This is on purpose. Long breaks, unhurried meals, and opt-in activities where people spend time together outside the session room. Because look, we're all people. Where else in your life can you talk to someone else who understands your job as a B2B marketer? I go to my kids' swim lessons. I can't sit there and talk to dad next to me about B2B marketing, but you can through the Exit5 community. And that's what DRIVE is all about. It's September 8th through 10th, 2026 at the lodge at Spruce Peak in Vermont. Check it out, exitfive.com/drive to learn more about it. It's exitfive.com/drive, and I hope to see you there. I also think that it being easy should not be the, like, benchmark for, like, hey, I think that good content actually does take time. It's almost— that is what makes it good. It's because you had to interview subject matter experts and really dig to find a point of view or I've used this example a bunch, but like Emily Kramer from MKT1, you know who she is? You've seen her Substack? Yeah. So she's like, I talked to her a couple weeks ago and she's like, yeah, I write like twice a month, once a month. And it's because I'm doing a ton of research and a ton of data. I'm like, perfect. Like, I don't know if that works. Like, for her, that works. That's amazing. But I like it because it's like, she's going to go super deep and win on like depth and data and sources versus like, I'm going to just publish a million times in a month and hope something good happens. And so I think we're always under pressure by like management and others to like find the easy button for marketing. And it's like, just create more content when it's actually like, I don't know, I always, I love that concept of more so people are talking about like 5 years ago by like pillar content, 10x content, right? Instead of blog posts every day, what if once a month we publish like some piece of original research that was actually worth sharing.

Yeah, the, the example I'll give you from like in-house here was one that Josh, who's our webinar lead and our content lead, he created back in probably this time last year, February 2025, around the 10x content engineer and kind of like we were going through there, he interviewed a ton of subject matter experts internally, talked to a ton of our customers. So that gave him like a lot of key context. But Josh did like toil over this piece for like a week. It wasn't as if we tried to like make it keyword optimized and like absolutely pristinely structured. So that was going to work incredibly well in an agent, but it was well written. It was written to like a problem that existed and does exist in the market. And it is like by far and away the outstanding piece of content from whatever angle we want to measure it. And like, again, content engineering was not a high search, like didn't have high keyword volume. It wasn't something that anything existed on YouTube about, but it very much kickstarted our own initiative of like making this like a craft to go and invest in. So a lot of the best content, as you said, comes from someone putting in the work and like wrecking their brain. But I think now you can start to use at least like tools to help you get there.

I think in the past, a lot of people would say You know, like, how do I, well, how do I find a great writer? And I don't want to take anything away from the craft of writing and being a great writer, but from a marketing standpoint and a business growth standpoint, maybe what's cool about the role of content engineers, I actually think we have more tools than ever. If you're, if you're not an amazing copy or amazing pro, that doesn't mean you can't create amazing content. Look at social media, right? Imagine saying like the only people that could go viral on TikTok are professional videographers and it's like, no, we, You could be, what, what if your, what if your angle on being a great content marketer is like, you're really great at coming up with hooks and you're great at doing the research. Mm-hmm. And then you can use the tools to like help you create the content. I think it doesn't have to be, I've always struggled with like, all right, well, who's gonna write this like 2,000-word article? Well, we have more of the tools at our disposal to, to be able to do that. All right. We're gonna shift over to webinars. So TL;DR on this one is AirOps loves webinars. Webinars are crushing for you all. You did 14 webinars in Q4 in 2025. And you've applied your kind of analytical growth mindset to your webinar funnel. I thought webinars were dead. I know they're not because I love them. But wait a second, it's 2026. I got a VP of growth at like a hot, you know, AI company telling me that his growth hack is webinars. Please enlighten me. What is your webinar playbook, sir?

Oh man, I don't— I won't reveal all of it, but like webinars are back. That was like the story for 2026, at least for us. And I think like to explain why they're so good, it's kind of worth taking a step back to why we started them. So initially when I came in again, it was like very different company, very different space. But what I wanted to do was we had these amazing builders. We had like, now today we'll call them content engineers. We had amazing builders on the platform, just doing wild and crazy stuff and like having amazing results with it. And I was like, The best way for us to get more users or get our names out there is like help tell the story of these amazing people. And a lot of them were not content focused. We had like Sean Linehan who runs like an executive coaching firm. We had Matteo who now is a content engineer, but back then he was doing kind of like product marketing work. And it just started with like, let's unlock these stories and that just gives us ideas and gives the market ideas.

And then, okay, so let's just like geek out on the tactics a little bit here. So yeah. The number one thing was like really finding good stories to tell on a webinar.

Yes. Okay. Correct. And like, we also have the benefit of being in a super influx market. So search changes a ton. So what we really care about is connecting the leading practitioners to the leading, like, experts. So we will start off when we plan out a quarter with like a skeleton and we're like, we need to speak to the content engineer, we want to try and speak to the CMO. And we'll have like 2 or 3 tracks. And we will generally say these are like 2 or 3 hot subjects. So like right now, it might be query fanout or Cloud Code. And we're gonna say like, we need to hit on these like 2 or 3 things across 2 or 3 different tracks. And then it was not easy 12 months ago, but now we have the luxury of, we will try and match Who is the best person in the market for this problem? And how do we like find our way to meet them? So there's kind of like trying to identify what's hot, what people want to learn about, and who can help us kind of like, who's the industry expert that can like tell that story. But we also need to be very flexible with that plan. So one of the highest performing webinars we ran, and actually it was in Q4, was with Mark Williams Cook, huge SEO agency guy out of the UK. I forget what we had Mark committed to originally, but 2 weeks out, he was like, guys, like, we need to like throw our original agenda out the window. And after going super deep in Google AI mode, which was relatively new, and he was like, I have a ton of research, like, let's cover that. And we're like, fantastic, great. Because we had been receiving on sales calls, we had been getting questions in from previous webinars of like Google AI mode being a key thing people wanted to dig into. So there's definitely from a tactical standpoint, many little growth things that we do, but we try and create a skeleton, match ourselves and our audience with the best people who know their topics and then go deep.

Timeless principle number 47, right? Begin with the end in mind, which is like, I think a lot of times we see, you know, I'll see people in our community or marketers, it almost seems like that's just an existing channel that marketing does. And so it's like, we got to do webinars. We're going to do 3 webinars a month because we need each one of them to produce 5 MQLs and we need to find a way to turn it into sales ROI. And so we need to make it like very product focused. And so it's like, join us for the Salesforce blah, blah, blah webinar. And it's like, well, who's going to go to that? Where what you did is like, this is what I love about marketing, right? It's like, here's a trend in the, like, it is so obvious to me in our marketing sphere that like everyone is talking about Claude Code. In the last 30 days. That's the work one. If I had to do a personal life one, it would be like saunas. Everyone's talking about the benefits of sauna right now. Right. So it's like, I could do— I bet if I did a webinar on saunas and if I did a webinar on the health benefits for men and women in their late 30s of sauna, like I would crush just because you're, you're out there. Part of being good at content is just like having a feel for the market. And so it's Instead of doing— instead of instantly being like, well, how are we going to make this an AROps product webinar where we show them product? It's like, no, no, no, these are people who care about these types of things. The thing they care about right now that actually has nothing to do with AROps is Claude Code. Let's do a killer webinar on Claude Code. During that webinar, we get them to know, like, and trust us, and then we can, you know, run the plays from there, right?

100%. And someone asked me the last day, they were like, so Like, how much do you care about MQLs? How much do you care about like getting the sales pitch in there? And I'm like, honestly, that's the last thing that is on our minds when we're creating this content. Like, let's get to that.

I do want to answer that because sometimes people give me a hard time when I say stuff like this because it's like, yeah, yeah, rah, rah, rah, great topic. But ultimately, like the end of the day, the way someone measures the oftentimes like the person who's responsible for managing the webinar program, right? Her job is to book some number. There needs to be some measurable outcome. And I know you care about this. So Well, let's get to that, but I want to like talk to the webinar stack. So first, like, what do you run the— what tool— people love tools. What tools do you use to use a webinar platform? Any tech stack stuff you can share?

Yeah, we're going to change it in the next while, but right now we use Luma for managing the event and communications with people who register. Then we use like HubSpot for all of our email.

What are you going to change to?

We're currently looking at a few different tools. If anyone who's selling is interested in giving us a discount, I'd be more than happy, but we'd love to bring everything into like one platform. There's just nuances as we get to like a bigger scale of trying to segment our audience that like Luma doesn't do a great job on. So that's some, some tool we need to find by the end of like this quarter.

Okay. And HubSpot, you mentioned HubSpot for what? For emails. Okay. So the webinar thing, the webinar platform has to connect to HubSpot so you can send emails. Correct.

And that I have a story on as well in a minute. But Zoom, we just have like scaled from internal meetings to like Zoom webinars. And then we do pretty sophisticated personalized follow-ups with Klai, Triggify, and Smartlead in the backgrounds, and then like Zapier. So we've many small little signals we monitor, they come into like Klai or AirOps to kind of get condensed, personalized, and then we send out emails via mixture of HubSpot and Smartleads. So there's a core set of tools, but also like many other small ones in there.

Can you share anything about the follow-up strategy? Because I think this is where, okay, well, we're gonna just have sales follow up with everyone attended, didn't attend. Like there's different strategies for like who attended, who didn't attend. Yeah. What's the offer? You know, if I get an email after the webinar that I went to, but it's like, hey, book a, hey, AirOps is the shit, book a meeting with us tomorrow. I'm not gonna do that. I'm curious if, you know, what are some of the signals? What might be a good outreach? You know, that Claude Code webinar is an example. How do you book an AirOps demo from that?

The booking the demo is not the thing that we care about, which is like, okay, so what is the metric that you care about then? Whatever that is. We care about like engagement with the content that we put in front of someone. So again, answering your, your previous question for doing follow-up, the context that we care about is Is this your first event to come to? That requires something very different to a person who's a customer that's coming to their 15th event. So it's like, where in your journey, where along your journey in terms of attending our webinars are you? We also look back at what context do we know about this person from questions they've asked or pages that they've been on. And then we also, we do a lot of pre-work before a webinar to get personalized questions from our audience. So those 3 sets of How many webinars have they attended? What do we know about them from like, what is available? Like, have they done a signup but nothing else? Have they viewed different pages? And then the most recent context gathered from them, all of that comes in together within like an AirOps workflow. And from there, we basically have 3 or 4 assets that we can share with someone after the fact. One might just be a recap if people didn't show up, and we can't really like push them too much further down the funnel or their education journey without just giving them like a recap of like what event they missed out on. If someone is like very far down and they're attending their 10th webinar, that's gonna be more of like, can we enable them like deeper in the product? Can we give them like a demo of our latest feature? Again, like all async so that they can enable themselves. And if someone is far more top of funnel, they have come to an event to educate themselves. So they probably want to do more work there. So we spent a ton of time internally on our own research. So we're very much like research-driven in our follow-up to say, hey, like, this is a trend we've noticed on your website. This correlates with this piece of research we have done. We think this is how you should interpret it and like action on it yourself. So it's very value-driven. We're never going go to Dave and say like, hey Dave, you were on this, now you're educated, come talk to us. And how do you do that? That's where the magic lives. Okay. That is workflows that we have. We must have done 40 webinars at least last year. And in each one, our aim is to like continue to get the, the open rate up, the click-through rate up, and the conversion rate. And then measuring some of that stuff is very difficult because for each person, they're kind of being left with a different call to action, but it's really like tight refinements on many different parts of the system that compound over time.

And are you able to like look out in the future and then you know that webinars influence those deals? You know, like 90 days from now you see a Close One deal, everyone's excited and you're like, oh, yep. They went to 2 webinars and then you like kind of reverse look at it versus like, all right, we did this webinar, where are the deals?

Where are the deals? Yeah, we do not look at like trailing 14 days. It is like a 30-day or like 90-day lag, 30-day on maybe like demo booked, 90 days more so on like closed one or like qualified business. So there is like a nice pop when we do a webinar, people who are just like, oh, like, I see these guys are experts. They're talking about something I need to like go deeper on. I want to actually talk to a human. We will see like a pop in demos booked, but very much it has like a long tail effect. I'm like, that's what we're trying to go for. Like, we'd much rather win the long-term game than like optimize the crap out of the short-term game because you're just going to burn relationships. So I have definitely evolved over time from the like, let's gate everything. Let's like make sure that we squeeze every email out of everyone as often as we can to just be, how do we create the best content, give it away for free. And then when someone has their problem or needs a solution in the future, we're the first name top of mind. And I think you asked me the question on like, what webinar software are we gonna go with? I don't know. Like no one's like always in my face saying like, we're the best for this reason. Or more so like offer me value of how I can better engage with my community or like audience. No one's doing that to me from like the webinar side. So I actually don't have a top of mind name right now.

All right. Don't worry. Depending on when this podcast comes out, you'll get—

I'm sure I'll get a lot of call outbound. Yeah.

No, that's good. And then how do you— how have you earned the right to do this? Right. I think someone's listening. They get it. My friend Pranav from Paramarkt would say, like, don't treat people like morons, right? If you do something good and then over time they're going to come back and tell you that they heard about you or whatever. We've been doing this podcast for 3 years. I don't try to drive Exit 5 members from this, but like literally every single week people say, oh, I heard about you on the podcast. It's just because we've been doing it. Do you have a tight relationship with, with the management team? Like, do you have to Do you have to get permission? Is it, do they believe in your marketing strategy? Because if anyone, if anybody else was like, hey, here's the deal, we're going to do all these webinars, we're not going to gate any of them. The follow-up is kind of going to all be different, but like, this is going to lead to deals somehow. Just trust me, right? Like on the outside, it's like, oh, that doesn't work. Maybe it works for you, but how did you make that work?

It's a good question. It's kind of going back. It is the question age-old of like attribution. Like no one has solved it. No one ever will solve it. So like it is a matter of storytelling. And I think it comes back to, I don't want to say like I'm a great storyteller, but I can find the data that can help back up my point of view that I have high conviction in. So early on it was like, damn, like, Owen, you're investing a crap ton of time in this like webinar thing. It hasn't really taken off yet. Like maybe we should put our focus elsewhere. But basically I talked to like some of my advisors, my mentors, and they were like, no, you like need to get into a rhythm here before you completely rule it out. So it was great advice I got at that point because we had done like 3 or 5 and hadn't seen results, but it was starting to show up in sales conversations, which was my qualitative, like, data point. And then we did like number 6 and 7, and we started to like refine our call to action, started to refine like what we did in follow-up, just tried to like sell less on the call. And then just like the hamster wheel started to move. And when it starts to move, you're more easily finding proof points. You're better equipped to like tell a story internally. And then you get to this point of perpetual motion where it's just like, hey, this is the thing that we do. And like our co-founders or the rest of our team, even as new people join, they're like, oh, like Digital Pure, like I know this amazing person. So we're originally It was really tough to get it off the ground. Now we're in a, like a privileged position of we have to turn down guests right now, which is tough. So we're always looking to scale, but I think it comes back to if you're trying to repeat this motion elsewhere, it comes back to having high conviction, finding some data points to back up your point of view, where along the journey you are, and then like storytelling it like internally and keeping your market informed as well.

It's like, I don't know if you play golf, but there's a common analogy to a lot of things, which is like you have to find the right balance of like not trying too hard, but you need to try a little bit. And it's almost like the same is true with like with marketing. It's like if we try to do these webinars and we're like, we're doing this webinar and we need 5, you know, MQLs from it, then it's like too much pressure. But if you're too laissez-faire with it, like you don't get the right thing. And so, yeah, I like what you said. We often use internally, we say like momentum creates clarity. And so it's like you've done— you did a couple. I love the feedback loop. From sales, that's obviously the ultimate one. If a bunch of people start saying like, yeah, we've been going to the webinars, like, oh shoot, okay, let's go do more of those. Somehow we chewed up a lot of this time, but I'm gonna keep you for a couple more minutes. Uh, webinars, good enough. You left enough there to be desired. I, I do have two quick follow-ups. One, you mentioned like, are there some type of signals, like, you know, someone that goes to the webinar, are you ingesting like data from, you know, web, your, your websites, CRM, uh, other sources, and then kind of scoring them in some way? Yeah, I feel like you mentioned something like that. Yeah. And what are you doing that with?

We have a bunch of signal tracking tools. So like, or B2B for like person-level enrichment. We use like HockeyStack to get a better feel of when we have performance ads. Is someone at a company getting a ton of ads or no ads? And again, it is so interesting in that perspective. We do a customer deep dive every week. How many people come in and say that they found us through personal research? And if you're listening, I'm doing like air quotes. The people who come in with personal research have received a crap ton of ads. So we use like HockeyStack or B2B Triggify and like what HubSpot, HubSpot tracks out of the box to figure out what has their journey been over time, how long do they know about us, and then kind of like their most recent activity as well. Okay, cool.

Because that seems like such a useful thing. It's not just about that webinar in a vacuum. It's like they maybe they also did this and they did that. And then how do you get butts in seats, right? Somebody's like, yeah, well, whatever, you are ops, like you raise money, you made an announcement, you got a lot of hot buzz, you got a list. Like, how are you getting butts in seats to these things? Any secrets?

There's a few secrets I'll keep in my back pocket because I want to make sure. Okay.

No, I respect that, as you should.

I do think 80/20 rule applies. I'll keep the 20%. The 80% is just— and again, this is— you need to develop towards it of like the storytelling, but give away the value. Like, I have learned that so much in the last 18 months. Like, don't gate, and that will feel so hard to let go of in certain organizations because you're targeted against like an MQL goal or like a sales qualified goal. But give away the value. And what— how I look at it and how we look at it is we win when our like audience wins, and our audience even in the last 30 days, I've never seen as much public love on LinkedIn about our webinars where they're like screen recording in the background because they don't want to wait 6 hours for us to send out the email. And they're sharing out snippets on LinkedIn, they're doing their own UGC of it on amazingly TikTok, but also YouTube. So the whole thing is like, basically give as much value as possible, like find their pain points and democratize access to thought leaders or the like best insights, and then your users will do the distribution for you.

Pick a hot topic, also helps. True. Okay. Couple, two quick hitters. Gimme, gimme two things, two other channels or two things that are working besides webinars. Well, we, you're doing content, you got a content engineer, that, that whole thing is working. You're using your own product to do that webinar program. One or two other channels that are like promising and a, and a part of the, the mix moving forward for AirOps.

Yeah, maybe just like one bit of sage advice for the audience as well. And I'm a young guy, so take my use of sage with a pinch of salt. And I think the channels marketing teams should focus on should be ones that establish trust and then agent visibility. They're very different, but I think they all come back to like authenticity. So from our side, like webinars, our own content, they actually fall a lot into both buckets, but also agent visibility. Trust is really where we're trying to hone in on. So we do a ton of enablement and we, we probably spend more time enabling people who are not customers than actually customers. But the whole goal is to educate people on how to use these tools. Like we've mentioned Cloud Code a ton of times, we're running an upcoming webinar on that. It's not something that like we've productized, but we're like, if we can move the market further, like again, they'll know about us around these hot topics. So enablement is huge. It's establishing a real strong base of UGC and referral and like word of mouth for us. And then events, we actually, webinars, we keep coming back to, which is funny, but we ran them for like 10 months before we actually did any in-person first party event. And it was amazing. We had these people who met up in New York at like a hackathon and they were like Lucy and Vivian and Paul and like Mary, and they'd all been engaging on our webinar chats before, and then they met in person and they, they just created little pods in lots of different cities all over the US and actually abroad too. And they're kind of like almost grounds up creating their own events. And we're trying to meet it tops down with larger ones too. So events, community, they're all kind of together, but bundling up to trust, I think, as a core bucket of channels.

Anything that you're not inventing? Did anything get the axe in the 2026 budget? Come on, give me something. I know something. You fired a PR agency or something like that.

I don't know. No, we've been privileged of— I don't think anything got cut. What I, I, I, I don't feel— I'm hesitating because it feels like nothing has been cut on us because we're very quick to experiment. And experiments to us are like, how do we short-circuit our learning time? How do we like de-scope to like the smallest possible MVP, um, but make sure that it drives a learning or a signal out the far side? So we've had multiple bets that just like haven't paid off on existing channels, but we'll always start to invest or over-invest in the ones that work. So there's nothing that when I go to like a leadership meeting, I'm like, guys, like you've denied me 4 times on this. Uh, I can't say that honestly there is anything that falls into that bucket, but definitely get support, investment, and resources to move fast in the ones that are working for us.

Okay. All right. Fair. Whatever. That was a whole pod. Plus, that was a— I'll give you a D, but it's okay. Enjoy your weekends with cloud code because, my friend, that time is going to go away quickly.

So you better get sharp. You get sharp now.

Okay. Owen Clancy, this was an awesome, awesome episode. Smart guy. You came off great. You did a great job. We got some specific stuff in there. If you sell webinar software, go find Owen on LinkedIn. Actually, no, send him an inmail. You'll find him on LinkedIn. You can follow AirOps, see what they're putting out, a lot of useful stuff and, you know, winning by being helpful, which is awesome. Great to have you on the pod. Lots of people have said really nice things about you and I agree. Did a nice job on the pod and I'll continue to follow you and we'll check you out on the next episode. Thanks everybody for listening. Listening. I'm Dave Gerhardt and I'm out of here.

Oh, and see ya.

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