Evangelists, Not Mascots: Why AdTech CEOs Are Failing at Marketing — and How to Fix it with Joe Zappa
- 19 hours ago
- 57 min read
AdTech has built some of the most sophisticated technology in the digital economy — and some of the most forgettable marketing.
In this episode of Signal & Noise, we sit down with Joe Zappa, Founder & CEO of Sharp Pen Media, to unpack a hard truth the industry rarely confronts: You can’t outsource belief.For decades, AdTech companies have treated marketing as something downstream — polish it, package it, delegate it. But Joe argues that’s exactly where things go wrong.
When CEOs hide behind feature lists, jargon, and generic positioning, marketing becomes interchangeable. And in a crowded ecosystem where everyone claims better targeting, better measurement, and better AI, invisibility becomes the real risk.Joe makes the case that the CEO must be the chief evangelist — not a mascot, not a quote-approver, but an active communicator who can clearly articulate:
What’s broken in the industry
What they believe about the future
Why their company exists
And why anyone should care
We go deep on:
Why AdTech messaging collapses into sameness
The difference between product speak and narrative
How to build a simple, usable messaging “Bible”
Why controversy is often safer than invisibility
The collapse of institutional gatekeepers — and what that means for founders
How AI can amplify clarity — or create “slop cannons”
Why humanities training may be more valuable than ever in the AI era
This conversation isn’t just about marketing tactics. It’s about leadership, conviction, and attention in a world where distribution is democratized and authenticity matters more than ever.If you’re a founder, CEO, CMO, product leader, or operator in AdTech, MarTech, or media — this episode will challenge how you think about voice, visibility, and responsibility. Because in 2026, you don’t win by having the best deck. You win by having the clearest belief.
Read Full Transcript Bellow:
Brett House (00:01)
Welcome everybody to our next episode of Signal and Noise. I'm Brett House, joined by my co-host Rio Longacre, who is now dressed like a lumberjack appropriately. Yeah, you're looking very 90s rock and roll, grunge era rock and roll with that shirt, Rio. Either that or you...
Rio (00:12)
I'm up in the mountains. This is very apropos Remember there was, remember in Williamsburg there was that lumber sexual trend? I never got into it by the way. This was like early 2000s. It was really weird. There were dudes who would show up with like these big belt buckles and like flared jeans. And it was very strange, but keep going house. I interrupted you.
Joe Zappa (00:39)
I'm not touching any of this.
Brett House (00:39)
Yes!
Joe Zappa (00:41)
My PR team did not approve this. This is not brand safe.
Brett House (00:43)
Yeah, yeah, and so, and...
Rio (00:44)
You're pretending it never happened.
Brett House (00:49)
So yeah, as everybody's learning Cigula Noise, we fly by the seat of our pants and we're a no BS media franchise decoding data tech and AI. And our special guest today is Joe Zappa, who, meaning in the ad tech space, maybe beyond ad tech, martech, maybe a little less well known, meaning in the ad tech space, know who Joe is. He's the founder of Sharp Pin Media. He's been one of the loudest advocates for a simple but uncomfortable truth that ad tech CEOs shouldn't just approve marketing, they should be its chief evangelists, which I think is a great, if that's a tagline, that's a good one, or it's something that Rio made up when we were scripting this out. But you were a marketing editor, and you mentioned this before our call, of a company called Street Fight, which focused on hyperlocal commerce. That seems like eons ago, according to how you described it, right? And I think the most important thing, after you, I'll give you a moment to introduce yourself is you were a major in comparative literature. I was a major in comparative literature. I think you're a PhD in comparative literature, if I saw that correctly from Cornell.
Joe Zappa (01:53)
was gonna say, don't downgrade the credentials that I spent an embarrassingly long time at developing. Yeah.
Brett House (01:57)
Yeah, yeah.
Rio (01:58)
We don't get many of those in a show. Yeah, very good.
Brett House (02:01)
Yeah, we all have kind of a Jace school type of background. I mean, I was a comparative literature major at UMass Amherst. I ended up getting an MBA from BU. But it was certainly an interesting and academic path that I quickly, after four years, said, I don't know if I want to take this much further into academia. You definitely took it further into academia, which I'd love to hear about. But tell the audience a little bit about yourself. We'd love to introduce you to the audience.
Joe Zappa (02:27)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I'm the CEO of Sharp End Media. We're a B2B tech communications agency. We do messaging, content marketing, and PR. Ad tech was our first niche. It's where we're strongest. ⁓ And you're right, my sort of philosophy is that ⁓ CEOs in B2B tech and ad tech especially should throw out the 2005 marketing playbook, which means generally you look at the way any B2B tech company does marketing. It's very old school. They go to events. ⁓You know, they have a PR agency that maybe focuses on earned media, which means trying to get journalists and event organizers to amplify your message. My take is why are you doing marketing the same way you could have done it 20 years ago? ⁓ You have first party communication channels at your disposal that you can use to talk to your audience directly, to say whatever you want, however frequently you want to say it. ⁓ And it allows for a direct connection between the CEO, who is always the chief evangelist of a company and who can be its most effective spokesperson and that company's audience.
So I want the CEO at the center of the marketing and communication strategy and I want them leveraging those channels to talk directly to their audience in B2B tech. Obviously LinkedIn is very important there and you know, all of us are very active there. Rio's great at this as well at being his own, you know, chief evangelist for whatever ⁓ company he's working for. ⁓ And yeah, that's the stick is trying to pull B2B tech companies into ⁓ the 2020s and get the CEO to step up and take a lead role in.
Rio (03:52)
Well, Joe, it's been really cool to watch and track your progress over the last few years as you've built your online presence, as you've built Sharp Pen Media. I think we ran into each other, was it possible? Like it must have been three years ago maybe, something like that. I think we grabbed a lunch together, it fun to get to know you. I think that's kind when you're just, not long after you started Sharp Pen Media, it's been great. And I wanted you on the show, I think it'd be a great conversation generally, you're really interesting guy and it's cool to see what you've built, but also just...The foundational thesis of what you built, think is so compelling, right? And I really sum it up as you can't outsource belief. And I think this is really a hard truth that, Deco, the point you just said, AdTech, MartTech, the CEOs of these tech companies, they need to confront this. can't, the old marketing playbook, I really think it's dead. We're hearing this more and more in every episode. It's dead. You can't go to market the same way. People don't buy the same way. know, for decades, companies...
Joe Zappa (04:30)
Mmm.
Rio (04:47)
treated marketing something like they do downstream, know, we'll have polish material send out. We'll have a few campaigns per year. Maybe that's how the industry got built, but I think it's changed so much that it was time for something different. And I think what you're doing is important and very timely. So just to summarize the thesis, before we jump into the questions here, if a CEO can't clearly evangelize their product, I know this is something you can help them do. If they can't talk about their category, their point of view, why what they're like their company's important,
No amount of demand gen, no marketing budget, no media budget is really going to ever move the needle, right? They have to nail that and they have to be out there speaking loudly and clearly about that value proposition. that kind of sum it up, Joe?
Joe Zappa (05:31)
Yeah, I think the tagline, can't outsource belief is a great one and I'm going to steal it. ⁓ But I ⁓ always say like my version was kind of like the CEO is always the chief evangelist, right? Which is to say like the CEO and especially if you have a founder CEO, they are going to be the most eloquent spokesperson, the most believable spokesperson for a brand. And so why would you outsource message development and distribution to the marketing team, right? You want that person who is
Brett House (05:36)
Yeah ⁓
Rio (05:36)
You
Joe Zappa (05:58)
going to be the most credible spokesperson for the brand to be out there talking directly about it and talking to customers. And now the thing is, for decades, ⁓ that was a much more difficult thing to do because you had to depend on third party gatekeepers to get the message out, right? Like you had to talk to the media, whatever. But now the CEO can just do a podcast like this, right? The CEO can post on LinkedIn. Yeah, they can do a newsletter. And so there are all these channels that the CEO can use to direct and distribute their message. But the other thing that I would say is just to zoom way out.
Rio (06:16)
Or go to LinkedIn, as you mentioned, right? Yep.
Joe Zappa (06:27)
and not just be like a B2B marketing hack for a second. Like this is a much broader trend, I think across like media, right? And communications. Like if you think about like the way Hollywood is evolving, the way the media is evolving, the way politics is evolving, you see this collapse of institutions in this shift in power from institutions to individuals, right? So if you think about politics, the parties have been hollowed out.
Brett House (06:29)
Hahaha.
Joe Zappa (06:53)
Right? And now it is much more about individual political actors. Donald... Donald Trump most famously. ⁓
Rio (06:56)
That's being generous.
Brett House (07:01)
Hollowed out and full and fully. Yeah, that was a big quote in beginning of this whole era before Trump's is I was thinking of the TS Eliot poet poem, you know, the Hollow Men. And I I think there's they've been hollowed out in in fully and entirely bought and sold and compromised. Right. So I'm going to add to that.
Joe Zappa (07:13)
Yeah. followed out, pulverized. Okay but why is that, right? It's because they're not needed anymore. They're vestiges of an era where you needed an institution that would sort of introduce you to the voters, prop you up, whatever. And nowadays, a charismatic politician like an AOC or a Trump or whatever, direct. They can just create whether, know, Trump's a little more old school, but even Trump, he loved Twitter, right? He was great at Twitter. Now he has Truth Social.
Brett House (07:37)
He's got direct access, right?
Joe Zappa (07:47)
⁓ know, AOC is obviously huge on like Instagram. And then in Hollywood, you see it too, right? Because it's like, it's not about the old studios anymore, right? It's about individual influencers, movie stars as, you know, Instagram personalities, same thing with like music. So just across media, this is happening. And I think if anything, B2B marketing, like our little corner of the world, we're like the last people to have found out that this, you know, the CEO or the individual should be the chief of analysts.
Brett House (08:12)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah,
Rio (08:14)
I think
Brett House (08:14)
the days back in the, and I grew up similar to you. I probably moved much closer to sort of the product strategy, product architecture, and sort of launch GTM type of approach of marketing, but I played enough in sort of the communications and PR and content realms to be dangerous. And I agree that back in the day, in the early 2000s, I was part of Exolate that got acquired by Nielsen. There was there was a day when you could put out a press release about a product launch right ⁓ or a series of prequel press releases even if they were just incremental updates and that was a way that you would get like repeated coverage in the trade publications and and the trade publications would would publish this stuff to the point where I think people got fed up and they were like these Trump up to the cases just shit Karen
Rio (09:00)
But this is back when people cared about the first publications and actually read them, right?
Brett House (09:05)
Yeah, the
press publications were becoming like we're shilling the wares of all these tech vendors that end up inevitably investing in their events, investing in their media, right? And those days seem to be over, right? There seems to be a much bigger need for taking that vision, let's say that's the founder vision, somehow using that, especially like I think you have to place where you're talking, it's sort of like almost above the funnel It's like the personality, the definition of that business and the value they deliver to market. But then there's all these other downstream things that follow that. And we should talk about that as well. But that was less of a question than a statement. I apologize.
Joe Zappa (09:47)
I love statements. ⁓ I'll respond to kind of also a podcast. So I don't even need questions. No, no, think floating above the funnel, like, I think the cool thing about this, sort of CEO evangelism approach is that to me, it encompasses the entire funnel, right? It's all the way from top of funnel brand awareness, you know, from what we're doing now, just talking about the industry and not necessarily selling to
Brett House (09:48)
Yeah! I know that's...
Joe Zappa (10:12)
you can have very direct connections with your prospects, right? Because if you're a CEO and you're doing a LinkedIn post or you're doing a newsletter and someone in your audience is listening or reading and then they reply, then next thing you know, you have an active sales conversation, right? And so I think that's one of the cool things about it is to your point, Brett, if you're depending on journals, journals aren't gonna sell your wares, right? So ⁓ it's always gonna be kind of top of funnel, right? But with the kind of content we're describing where you control the message,
You can do a variety of things. You can sort of talk about what's going on in the industry and keep it very awareness driven, or you can go straight to them and to your prospect and talk directly about you versus competitors, causes of your product, answer questions, et cetera.
Rio (10:53)
It's interesting, Joe, how you say it's impacting and disrupting all these industries. I completely agree. think that, let's say, tech has been one of the, not the last bastion, one of the later industries to see this trend. mean, ad tech, you've been leading the charge, but I'm seeing more and more of it generally. I would say one industry it hasn't really disrupted yet is consulting, which I think is starting to happen with the shift from the pyramid to more of an obelisk model, right? And the bigger emphasis on at real expertise and personalities rather than just structures. So I think that's a really interesting point that you made about politics and how media, I mean, we're all being impacted by this, right? That the role of the creator, the role of the expert and the ability with these new channels, you can talk directly to your prospects, to your customers, to everyone. And you you mentioned Donald Trump. I think that's why the Democratic Party has so much trouble dealing with him because he has that direct channel of communication. People disparage him for it But he uses it effectively. And I think you're an AOC. There's a whole new crop of politicians who are probably going to be really good at this.
Joe Zappa (11:59)
So ⁓ and I think it probably drove like ⁓ stalwart House Democrats like a Nancy Pelosi insane, right? That like figures like AOC arrived to Congress and they don't technically have a lot of power within the halls of Congress, but they have a tremendous amount of media power and influence and that is because of that ability to cultivate direct relationships.
Brett House (12:14)
Yep.
Rio (12:15)
Yeah they say, you don't have the experience, you haven't been in government, but guess what? They have a platform and they have an audience and they can communicate really damn well. That's super important.
Joe Zappa (12:25)
Yeah, you know what no American, especially younger Americans, gives a hoot about is like, who is chair of the whatever in the F committee? they're...
Brett House (12:25)
Yeah.
Rio (12:31)
I'm sorry.
Brett House (12:32)
Yeah, well, it's got good and bad. It democratizes who can actually speak to the public and gain audience. But it also, when you democratize, you also have the Candace Owens of the world. You also have the people that can game the system in a way that ⁓ you start to be able to, you start to have, and I see this in my own kids, you start to struggle defining who's a real ⁓ credentialed individual that is coming to the table with case studies and experience, know, whether they're a politician or an investigative journalism, it's almost like these, it's you can't tell truth from untruth in some cases if you're not paying close attention. That's kind of the danger of the democratization, I think.
Joe Zappa (13:16)
totally agree, Brett. mean, the shift from institutions to individuals has not been purely positive. It's had like all these deleterious ramifications. But what I would say to anyone, whether they're in politics or business, is ⁓ we're not going back, right? Like you're never putting that genie back in the bottle. Yeah, the gatekeepers are never regaining control. And so the only way to compete is to compete and to play on that level, which means, you just like Democrats, to Rio's point, like
Brett House (13:30)
Yeah, yeah.
Rio (13:31)
Yeah, not happening.
Brett House (13:40)
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (13:46)
You know, just hoping, like bullying the New York Times and being like, you need to do better headlines and then that'll fix this. Like, no, the better New York Times headlines are not going to fix this. It's not about working the gatekeepers anymore. It's about going direct to your audience. And so whether you're in politics or business, you gotta play.
Brett House (13:58)
Yeah, and adapting to those realities right? And we always talk about how human behavior doesn't adapt to the speed of tech and the speed of media channel innovation changes, right? And we're in this period where we're sort of seeing this stuff happen in real time and you're seeing a lot of the tumultuous sort of ⁓ odd reactions in stuff happening in the space. I think that's because we just haven't adapted to this new model, arguably. Yeah.
Rio (14:25)
Yeah, a society tries to catch up but maybe Joe returning, mean, it's a bold new world. And you've done a great job building a business, I think really around this. maybe like, let's maybe step back a little bit, Joe. Your background's really interesting. And it's funny too, like we've got two English majors on this. I actually studied political science compared to literature. sorry. And you're a PhD, so we could, so.
Brett House (14:47)
Comparative literature, we gotta define that job.
Rio (14:52)
But I love to hear maybe about, you go into your background, talk about like what you're studying, I think how it's helped you, how it's helped you become, you know, let's say a better marketer, a better thinker, a better business owner and founder. I'd to hear about that.
Brett House (15:00)
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (15:07)
Yeah, I studied comparative literature after undergrad. I went to do a PhD in that field. While I was doing that, I was also working as a trade journalist in MarTech for many years. mentioned Street Fight, so that's how I kind of got into the ad tech MarTech universe. to the extent that it influences what I do now, think it's that like, academia is a battle of ideas, right? It's all about having a point of view. Everyone's talking about the same shit they've been talking about for like over a century, right? It's just.
Brett House (15:34)
Yep.
Joe Zappa (15:35)
It's just like, you have to have a novel point of view and every essay needs to begin with all these other people have said this, I'm saying this, and this is how it's different. And so it's really an exercise in intellectual differentiation. And that is the insight I was able to sort of build an agency on because I was working as a trade journalist. was, was, you know, finishing a PhD and I was like, okay, academia and journalism, infamously horrible job markets. Hey, PR people have been pitching me for years. Can you show me what you do? And I started working for their agencies, but when I started my own agency, I didn't have like a network from like decades of being in business, which is how most people start agencies. They're sort of like monetizing relationships. So I needed to break through through other means from both a distribution and point of view perspective. And that's where the executive evangelism philosophy I've ⁓ pioneered came from was first, I need to have a different point of view. So what's it going to be? And it became the sort of like modern like⁓ LinkedIn first party distribution channels. They're not just like a part of what a new ⁓ modern PR agency does. They're actually the center of what a modern PR agency does.
Brett House (16:36)
Yeah, yeah. And this isn't just social media marketing. It's an extension to kind of a PR agency's book of business or book of services. This is more than.
Joe Zappa (16:45)
Right, Brett, and that's what agencies always do when they're usually helmed by people who have been around longer than I have is they're always like, okay, now we'll start our social media insights practice. And I'm like, you sound so old. No, it's not like you have that existing thing and then there's a little practice. It's like, this is the center of communications. This is how information is communicated nowadays.
Brett House (17:07)
Yeah, it's a paradigm shift and that's what you're defining. It's not just like, it's not just another media channel that you can just leverage. It's a paradigm shift. And if you don't understand the shift, then you're not gonna be able to really implement the media effectively, right? The channel effectively.
Rio (17:20)
You know, you're a
Joe, you know, that best been really helpful. like that program forced you to be really good at like, like reviewing a lot of information, consuming it quickly, synthesizing it, understanding it, and being a really damn good writer. And when I read your posts, look, everyone use AI to help them. We're going to get into that a little bit of like how you're using AI as a professional. think that's very interesting, but like you were a very good writer. And I, I was a journalist for my first couple of years after grad school. And I tell you, like was, it talked about crappy professions to make, to make a living in which is why I'm not doing it today, but being a good writer, and I tell people consulting, like that's probably the most useful skill I gained early in my career. I've used it my entire career. It's helped me in every job I've ever had. I I bet that's helped you a lot too.
Joe Zappa (18:05)
Yeah, thank you. really appreciate that as kind. And yeah, I think at their best, right? What did the humanities do? They teach you to be a lucid thinker and writer. And then if you can take that into business, yeah. And if you can take that into business, it's a huge asset because that is essentially the job of a communications professional. However, I will say, I think a lot of B2B marketers, like they're very tactical, right? And that's not always their fault. That is to the point Brett was making in the beginning. The CEO often puts them in that position where it's like all of the, like my friend Dan Robbins at PayPal,
Brett House (18:13)
Yeah, and a critical thinker in writer. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Joe Zappa (18:35)
which is Sharpen Klein, he said, like, marketing should be an input, not just an output, right? It's not like all the important work gets done. And then to Brett's point, then you're like, marketing team, put out a press release about this. It's like, ideally, you should have someone in your marketing department or in your agency, who's doing what we're doing now, who's thinking about like, thinking critically about the industry and being like, what should we participate in the conversation about? What are we building? What are we releasing? How are we describing it? How are we going to differentiate? And if that
Brett House (18:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (19:02)
If the marketer participates in that sort critical thinking creative process, then they will have a role in the C-suite and hopefully the company will be more effective at distributing products than people actually.
Brett House (19:12)
Yeah, yeah, and that's a much more strategic play. And like, I wanted to throw some stats out that I thought I think it tied into this is that where often the evangelism and the founder led sort of, I've got a mission statement, I'm Brian O'Kelly of Scope 3, I know that's a client. I'm out there talking about the value that a service or solution or product delivers to our end customers. But to me, the hard part, that's interesting and it's great, but there's a founder led conundrum Right, you run into a wall and I've dealt with this throughout my whole career working for startups that have exited where the founders oftentimes become the blockers of disseminating ⁓ this strategic decisioning, the value you're delivering to clients, the positioning, the field enablement because they've sort of kept all that knowledge so close to their chest.
And obviously the most effective leaders can share that. But what I see often breaks is that there's just a ton of inconsistency with how these things get decided and disseminated through the organization. And you just see, it's almost like the Chinese whispers, right? Where you say something to the first person in a circle and by the time it comes back to you, it's completely different. I often see that, in fact, 95 % of companies I've ever worked with or talked to in the SaaS world, there's a lot of breakage in how that sort of vision that seems so effective from the founder gets delivered down all the way through the customer success and management and growth organizations, right? So how would you think about that and how do you consult businesses around ensuring that consistency and value is sort of delivered through the of the life cycle management?
Joe Zappa (20:59)
Totally agree, great point about how this works in practice. think as the founder and or CEO, ⁓ you ⁓ can outsource the message and when you create the messaging playbook, ⁓ you should have like a three to four page document. It really doesn't have to be anything crazy where you just answer some fundamental questions about the business. I call it a brand narrative. It's like, what is wrong with the status quo? ⁓ Whom are we championing? How are they being underserved by the status quo? And how do we want to change the industry?
Brett House (21:23)
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (21:27)
benefit and how are we uniquely positioned to do that? And if you answer these sort of fundamental questions, just get it down on paper, put it in sort of narrative form, ⁓ you then as the founder are like ⁓ validating a narrative that you can distribute to the entire company and you can say to people, okay, run with this, right? So then you're sort of giving your team a messaging Bible and corporations and like giant PR agencies, they always screw this up because they're like, here's like a 60 page Bible, no No one's going to read that, right? It's way too complicated. Just like a simple, like three page document where you're just like, what do we stand for? What do we talk about distributed to the company? And then to your point, Brett, the founder or the CEO, sometimes they stand in the way because the team is afraid. What if I say something publicly and my C-suite is not completely aligned with it. And then I get in trouble. So many rank and file team members are scared of that. And it has to be a cultural directive from the CEO on down to say, we are all going to work together at growing this company. And the way to do that nowadays is to capitalize on modern distribution channels, which means I want you all posting on LinkedIn X, whatever it is, talking about the great work that we're doing, talking about what's going on in the industry and educating our prospects and customers about how to do their jobs better and how to work with the kind of technology we're propagating.
Rio (22:48)
As you're working with CEOs and companies, I I can imagine it's got to be challenging, right? Because CEOs can be, yeah, like they're usually the best evangelists, the best, you know, they had the vision that created the product, that created the company, right? So I would think that they can probably encapsulate it and explain it the best, right? But, you know, CEOs can also be quirky people. They're busy, you know, a lot of them have tech backgrounds. Like, I can imagine it's got to be challenging to convince some of them to this to show them actually how to like the blocking and tackling of getting the message out. Love that you can maybe talk about some of the obstacles you run into sometimes.
Joe Zappa (23:23)
Yeah, evangelism does not come naturally to all CEOs. And you pointed out correctly, Rio, that especially in the tech industry, Like generally speaking, if you have like a sales marketing CEO, it's a little easier. And if you have a technical CEO, it can be a little harder because they're less used to like touting the products, virtues in the public square. ⁓ One thing I will say that is good is that A, you can start small and you don't have to do it all at once. And it doesn't have to be super complicated. You can start.
Brett House (23:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (23:52)
by literally just like posting on LinkedIn once a week. And that post can be about a news story in the industry and sort of sharing your perspective on it. can be about building your company, right? And things you've learned about being a CEO or entrepreneur. ⁓ It can be sharing data that your team has put together on here's what's going on in the industry and here's what we're seeing. And what I would advise CEOs to do is to think of it like you are helping people. That's how it should be. Like I hope that whenever I go on a podcast or write or whatever, the lens I always try to take is like, want people to walk away from this conversation, understanding something new about communications and how they can just do it a little better. And if you look at it that way, it's generally much more palatable to people than if they think, okay, I'm like building my own personal brand or I'm shilling my wares or whatever. If you just think about it, like you're having a conversation with a customer or partner and you're helping them understand how to do whatever you're an expert on a little better, then usually it's easier for them to tap.
Brett House (24:48)
Yeah, well, you're typing into like a very, something that sort of inspired me and I always look at, you know, having been in marketing, but certainly leaning more in the product strategy set of things. I've had a few content marketers that I think change kind of the trajectory of my career and changed how I think about effective evangelism, right? And things that you're talking about. And there's a couple, there's Phil Fernandez of Marketa, and I'll tell you a story about that. And there's Marie Kondo, who everybody's Marie Kondo their sock drawer.
Joe Zappa (25:08)
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (25:18)
you know, or their closet at one time or another. And you think about those two. So the first book I ever read on demand generation, I read it was shortly after, it was back in 2006. And it was written by Philip Fernandez. I didn't know who he was, but I knew it was a book on the topic and there weren't a lot on the topics. And I sort of schooled myself in how this works, right? Not realizing that he was the CEO of Marketo. So by the time I got into a seat where I could decide on
Joe Zappa (25:18)
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (25:46)
hiring and either a vendor or a demand gen leader and implementing the stack, guess what? Marketo was up there at the top of the list because this guy gave a level of evangelism that was really educational to the operators in this space. It wasn't just a shill job of like what the product does, right? So that was one example. The other example, Marie Kondo. I think about who she was. She was a consultant that might be big in Japan, my wife is Japanese, so can speak openly about this, but this might be big in Japan to actually go in and help people better organize their lives, right, and all the kind of benefits, the downstream benefits of sort of freeing yourself and being more spiritually open and psychologically open and taking all of those burdens off, know, there's all this with her. But she did a television show wrote a book and went from being basically an individual consultant that helps people declutter to being like a billionaire. And to me that was all driven by evangelism and counter marketing. Where do you see, those are the lessons that I've gained from that power of being able to deliver the value that this thing, sometimes it's even aspirational value I think with the condo case, to the end customer. Where do you think about CEOs and what's kind of inspired you right in terms of seeing it in action when it's done really effective by a CEO or an evangelist that's had a huge impact on the business.
Joe Zappa (27:10)
Mmm.
Yeah, you know who's someone who's done this exceptionally well on the global stage and is also sort of like reached or reaching like billionaire status by doing this is Ryan Serhant, the realtor. You guys follow his stuff at all? seen him? He, yeah, yeah. So he was on million dollar listing. So, you know, he was like on a reality TV show, but how he really like blew up ⁓ was social.
Brett House (27:27)
No.
Rio (27:27)
I know he is but I don't follow stuff now.
Joe Zappa (27:42)
you know, and has like a massive following, like millions of followers on Instagram. And he's built this whole real estate brokerage, this whole firm ⁓ predicated on like, we go to market via social media, right? And he is like hired tons of people who take the same approach. And then it led to him having his own Netflix show. ⁓ And so a great example of someone who has built this like founder led brand, right? The firm bears his name. ⁓
Brett House (27:56)
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (28:09)
and he has hired tons of people who follow that approach as well, ⁓ and has sort of elevated from like, all right, yeah, I could use ⁓ social media to sell some more apartments to building a, I think it's like the sixth largest brokerage in the United States now, right? Which that's like a massive industry and a multi-billion dollar business. ⁓ And really all it is, it's just like using, ⁓ understanding that the foundation of go-to-market is attention orchestration, right? Like that is the first thing you need to do is get attention and then you can worry about everything else. Cause if no one's paying attention to you and no one knows you exist, then you can't sell them anything, right? And so that's something that I think like, as we look at like our little corner of the world, right? And like B2B tech, I think that is something that people misunderstand is like they spend so much time thinking about the nuances of like product presentation and product marketing and messaging, whatever. And it's like.
Brett House (29:01)
Yep. And the word choice, yeah.
Joe Zappa (29:05)
Yes, exactly. And it's like, no one knows you exist. That's the first challenge. Like you need to gain attention and then you can worry about the nuances.
Brett House (29:08)
Hahaha!
Yeah, there's a fa-
Rio (29:14)
Joe, but I'm sure you get a lot of people when you talk them about this say, okay, that sounds good, but I bet a lot of them are afraid, right? Because they've learned over the years, well, if you put the wrong thing out, your stock can crack. I mean, you will hear these stories, right? Benioff said this other thing, made a joke about ICE, which apparently didn't go well and their stock tanked the next day. So I'm sure when talking to the CEOs, you get fear. Okay, I can't be out there. There's too much risk. There's too much downside.
How do you respond to that? Like when you get that, because I'm sure that's common pushback you receive when you talk to leaders about this.
Joe Zappa (29:46)
Yeah. I think I do hear that all the time Rio. So it's, it's insightful. think that the number one risk for B2B tech companies in particular, which tend to struggle with awareness and audience generation, especially in the beginning is invisibility. The number one marketing risk is invisibility. is not controversy. Once you now, now that is stage dependent. So to Rio's point, like Salesforce doesn't have an awareness or visibility.
People know Salesforce exists. So for them, yes, it is more worth like vetting everything you put out there and making sure you're avoiding unnecessary controversy. But for the vast majority of companies, especially startups and those earlier in their life cycle, the main challenge is people just aren't thinking about you enough, right? They got a lot going on in their day and ⁓ they may have never heard of you. You might be in a crowded category. It might be difficult to differentiate.
And so the number one challenge for those people is just to get on the radar. And so you should worry way more about invisibility than you worry about controversy. And then the last thing I'll say about it is there's a such thing as productive controversy, right? Like, especially for startups, like you don't want to pursue meaningless controversy. So if you're a startup founder in MarTech or retail tech, ⁓ please don't be like putting out random messages about ice. ⁓
Brett House (30:52)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's fun and
Rio (31:04)
Yeah.
Brett House (31:04)
it's a little fun play, right? Where there's a little uncertainty, there's a little like, there's gonna be win, it's the greatest sales deck ever made, right? It's that whole idea of like, you know, there's a big problem in this space and there's gonna be winners and losers and you're gonna be a loser unless you do this. That oftentimes is very good controversy. You're being provocative to generate like, hey, we should think about this. We might lose revenue as a result of X, Y or Z.
Joe Zappa (31:07)
Right. Exactly, or punching up, right, Brett? Like, there's a reason every like ad tech company punches up at Google and Meta. It's like, it's fine. No one's losing sleep over, you know, a little company, a series A company, you know, punching up at Google and Meta. by all means, yeah, Google's not worried, they'll be okay. So by all means, like seek out that controversy, you know?
Brett House (31:32)
Yeah.
Rio (31:43)
Yeah, Google's not worried.
Brett House (31:45)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there's two issues that I see that ⁓ often happen in organizations that I've seen through my whole career. Like once you get past sort of the CEO, because you get the greatest CEO evangelist in the world that's out there ⁓ preaching the wares and the value, but it's still going to be a general message to market, right?
And so once you start double clicking into specificity of message, specificity of buyer, of category, product market fit, That general message needs to start to go along that path, right? To get much more specific. And it all ties to relevance, which you kind of, it's like engineering relevance into the process, right? And there's like a figure I was reading from Gartner from 2026 that 73 % of buyers punish a relevant go to market in real time. And I'm like, what does that really mean? It means sort of relevance windows, like to prevent yourself from being invisible, you've got to make yourself relevant. And the window to do that in when you're communicating with somebody is shorter than ever because of like attention spans. And then that relies on consistency. How does your whole team, you your sales organization, your marketing organization, consistently deliver the right relevant message? You know, this isn't the right you know, the generic sort of right person, right time, the right type of message that takes some of that evangelism that's coming from the CEO and delivers it in practical ways that deliver value to the people that they're speaking to. And that divide to me is the biggest divide there is in effective sort of go-to-market is the breakdown between founder and some C levels that know the truth, right? The product truth, it could be the CPO, but everybody in the organization's reliant on those two or three people to do this effectively. And they can't adapt to the changes in the ecosystem because they can't get the story right from the beginning. So how do you fix that? How do you make it consistent so that then the rest of the teams can actually deliver consistent, relevant message at the right time, that kind of stuff to the people they're talking to?
Right?
Joe Zappa (34:00)
Yeah, I think you need a messaging framework that you can distribute throughout the entire company. And then I think, again, you need to foster, you need to foster a culture of actually sharing that message and make, people security. Say, you know, we're, we're, we want you out there and we understand that you being out there as a, you know, a manager, a director level person means, you know, once in a while you might say something that doesn't perfectly align with what the CEO himself or herself would say. And that's okay.
Brett House (34:12)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (34:28)
right, because the benefits are going to far outweigh the drawbacks. ⁓ And then the other thing is, of course, there's like, you you have the CEO level sort of external facing message. And then as you professionalize and as an operator, as an organization matures, ⁓ you're going to have specific messages for different parts of the company and products and whatever. And you know, that that can all be figured out. That's normal marketing stuff. But what I find, ⁓ Brett, is that ⁓ most companies don't even do the first step, right?
Brett House (34:56)
yeah. Yeah. And that's the foundation. Yeah.
Joe Zappa (34:56)
They don't have like the three to four page messaging Bible. They don't have the CEO founder out there, right? And then forget the, like, forget the rank and file. Like they're definitely not out there. So it's like, you know, in those three steps, like let's do one by one. And if you were to do all three of those, seriously, you would be in like the top 5%, probably the top 1 % of B2B tech organizations. If you had a clear messaging Bible, if the CEO were sharing it regularly and then the rank and file we're also sharing it's extremely.
Brett House (35:28)
Yeah, which is, which is...
Rio (35:28)
It's funny how, how, how she were,
how she were just quoting Gartner. funny with Joey. don't know you listen to it. We spent the last episode, but it's trashy. Talk about how their reports are irrelevant, but, but I guess getting back to the topic at hand here, Joe. like, okay. So we talked about like the different layers and I guess it's interesting. what if like you go to a client and the CEO just isn't good at it or doesn't want to do it or, or, or maybe there are other people who are, should be doing it as well. Like, can there be multiple stakeholders? Can it not be the CEO? Like, what is your opinion on that? What have you seen work?
Brett House (35:33)
Trashy!
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (35:59)
Well, I will acknowledge that there are companies for which this is a better fit than others. like there may be companies for which it's not a fit. any that's true of any like product or service. Right. So ⁓ so I will acknowledge that. That said, there are ways around it. Right. Like is the CEO the best fit to be the chief evangelist? Yeah. One hundred percent. Because people are always going to see that CEO title and they're going to be like this person represents the company and I believe them in what they say is true. ⁓ What they say stands for the company as a whole. But of course, there are organizations where you have a great CPO, CMO, CRO, et cetera, who can do this. And I think it's better if it's not purely on the CEO, because then it's a collaborative exercise. Yeah, exactly.
Brett House (36:40)
Yeah, it broadens the bench, right? It broadens the bench and then they look like they're not just a single player, they are a team and they've got a whole bunch of people that might come at it from different angles, but they're all staying consistent to like, this is the value it delivers to you, the person I'm speaking to or the company I'm speaking to.
Joe Zappa (36:58)
Right. we know that, you know, that's a look, if it's only the CEO founder who is out there sharing the message, then it creates key man risk and it's bad for enterprise value. Right. So like, it's good if, if others in the C-suite are participating. I just think that the founder and or CEO is always going to be like the most impactful person if they ⁓ can get with this program.
Brett House (37:08)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And what I'm seeing, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this, that we talked about this with Lupus Gallus at CES, this notion of of bolting with AI being sort of rampant and especially sort of prompt engineers, of like surface level ⁓ AI usage within organizations, within sales teams and marketing teams, et cetera. ⁓This notion of bolting AI onto kind of a risky or a non-existent GTM foundation or messaging foundation or positioning foundation, right? And how you end up getting more strategic drift because AI is just amplifying an already inconsistent play.
Joe Zappa (37:51)
Mmm.
Brett House (38:03)
Right? Or a builds that, you know, a brand messaging build or otherwise that you haven't actually put into place. Right? What are the risks of that? And how do you think teams should best ⁓ leverage it? Because I think it can really amplify the shift, right? ⁓ Or it can be used for good to compound the right types of decisioning actions and...
Joe Zappa (38:26)
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right, Brett. If used effectively, AI makes marketing strategy docs and messaging docs infinitely more useful. Because in the olden days, three years ago, ⁓ when you would create a messaging doc, the CEO would pay some firm a ton of money to create it. And then let's be honest, no one looked at it.
Brett House (38:38)
Yeah.
Ha ha ha!
Joe Zappa (38:53)
after it was done. Like maybe like you looked at it once and then it like just got lost or whatever. Now, no, no one read the whole thing and then no one would look back at it or most people wouldn't. Now, we've been given this incredible gift with LLMs because you can put that three to four page brand narrative messaging doc into your LLM and it can be used as the basis to create all future content and to hone what you're creating. then,
Brett House (38:53)
yeah.
Rio (38:57)
No one read the whole thing.
Brett House (39:04)
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (39:21)
Like let's say the CEO sees a news story and they're like, what should my take be on this? They can go to an LLM that's been fed the brand narrative that their messaging person got paid a zillion dollars to create. And they can say, based on our brand narrative, what should our response to this be? And even if it isn't perfect or if the style is like, know, AI and needs to be edited and you should edit the pros just to make sure people don't feel like it came straight from a bot, ⁓ it will feed you good ideas.
Rio (39:42)
Yes.
Brett House (39:45)
Yeah, and not a free publicly available AI LLM because that's where if you don't have the pro models or the team models that block sort of AI model training in the wider ecosystem, not only are you giving away your IP, but you're also getting just, you're getting less deep learning and less thinking. And so that's what I found is that,
Joe Zappa (40:04)
Yeah, yeah.
Brett House (40:06)
⁓ No, but I think that's a very important point is to kind of back to that notion of consistency and relevance. That stuff can be truly engineered. And that's actually what I'm doing in my company, High Signals, that you basically have a brain at the center of this.
Right? That you're feeding all of this information. You're feeding real time market inputs. You're feeding real time competitive inputs. You're feeling, feeding it everything that the product has to offer, right? Product roadmaps, documentation, ⁓ enablement stuff. And then you're allowing it to do scenario planning. And I'm not like being a total shill for my company High Signals. But that, but the idea that you can feed an engine this information at this level of granularity and some of it could also it doesn't have to be quantitative. could be qualitative research diagnostics and then allow it to always learn. It compounds the ability of the organization to ⁓ deliver up to date information that to your point Joe doesn't it's not the brand guide or the messaging guide of the competitive battle cards that had built been built once by like a product marketing person or a brand person and not touched for six years. Like those days are over because if you don't touch it and adapt your pitch and your go to market in real time all the time, your competitors are leveraging these tools and they're gonna eat your lunch. That's kind of my theory. Does that resonate? I mean, does that sound accurate?
Rio (41:30)
Yeah. Well, and I guess Joe, before you jump in too, I mean, I think that like to kind of another point for that question, like when AI for someone who has written these marketing briefs before has written these, has written these documents understands it can really structure the prompts or has trained their models the right way. I mean, it's, like you're 10 times better. I mean, you're, you're recruiting high quality stuff faster. That's easier to read. They can then be used for these other. it's like for the, so for the people with good judgment, good experience. 10 X. mean, we had one person on here drew, he was claiming he was having a hundred X designers now. Right. think the reverse of that though, right. Someone who doesn't know what they're doing. It's, could be a dangerous tool. Right. And like, you know, I posted this thing about no judgment plus LLM equals slop cannon. Right. that's, that's really, and I, and we see a lot of slop out there. love, love, love your thoughts on that.
Brett House (42:04)
Yep.
Joe Zappa (42:04)
Hehehehe
Brett House (42:14)
Yeah, totally, totally, exactly.
Joe Zappa (42:16)
100 % Well, what drives me insane Rio is when I see CEOs and executives who I know could hire someone to do this right. And they're just putting out AI slop. I'm like, guys, like we, you know, there has, we can do better. Yeah. Like these are incredible tools. ⁓ again, leveraged effectively, they make like strategy docs and they make your smart marketing person infinitely more effective and scalable. But you do need to, like, as we all know, anyone who uses AI and ideally uses it well, like.
Rio (42:32)
You can do better.
Joe Zappa (42:50)
it is a combination of prompting and editing, right? So you need to feed it the right information. need to like, you need to say, like, don't say react to this like news event be like based on our brand narrative or whatever, like, ⁓ like my initial thoughts are XYZ, like write a post like on this using those thoughts and tying it to our overall narrative, right? Like that kind of prompt and then edit it for style. So to say, you know, Write like me, use my language, ⁓ these kinds of things. Take out the botisms. I call it with my team, editing out bot voice, right? the, cause it hurts your credibility when it doesn't seem like you've put the time into putting it in your own voice.
Brett House (43:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always two words, like, yeah. Well, and you've got to use it enough to start to recognize the bodisms. You're like, that totally is like, that shameless slop. Like, you just know that those, you know, it's always these kind of over hyperbolic statements, like two word statements, that kind of stuff. Yeah, you can, yeah, yeah.
Rio (43:45)
Not this, but this, right? And then an dash, right? Yeah.
Joe Zappa (43:48)
Not this, but
that dash choppy. Yeah, you gotta, ⁓
Brett House (43:51)
Yeah, well, and what I think about that consistency of delivering the message to market, I it's going to be coming to the point where, I was telling Rio about this and something that I'm in the process of building and launching, but the idea that you could say, hey, I'm going into a big pitch. ⁓ I'm going to, I'm a B2B SaaS company. I'm targeting, let's say it's P &G and we're going into this big pitch. It's super important.
We've got to put time and effort. In the past, you basically take that pitch. You'd have a whole bunch of team members. I see this all the time with the CRO, you know, and a couple other people kind of feeding stuff in. And when they don't understand the messaging or some of the product capabilities, they pull in the product marketers, maybe a product leader. And everybody's kind of, ⁓ a lot of it's driven through intuition or just institutional knowledge. And they're just throwing stuff on a deck. They polish it up. They give it to the designer. The designer makes it nice. And they walk into the presentation. And I'm like, again, those days are over, right? Because there is a world where you can take that deck that's been shaped by your messaging dock and your strategic foundations and it's sort of accurate to the value you're delivering. Let's say to the CPG industry, but it may not be accurate to the person you're talking to, right? So there's a world right now where you can go and say, I'm talking to the CMO and the chief product officer, the brand manager, whatever. And they've got these profiles. It's like, it's not just the function, but it's the gender, where they're from, all this sort of stuff. You can take that information pop that in with your deck into an engine and say, completely customize this deck and give me the recommendations I need to know when speaking to her and him. Like exactly who they are as people, not just generic sort of archetypes, right? And it will update the information to the point where it's like, hey, you probably shouldn't show a product slide on slide two, or you probably should change some of your wording based on what we've seen. So that type of real-time learning of like where it's got the the human knowledge and the added sort of fingertips with AI is just, how do you leverage that? Because to me that powers your, compresses how quickly you can do these things and it powers just better decisioning that's more pressure tested against the actual reality of the market, right?
Joe Zappa (46:01)
Yeah. I'll just straight up tell you how I do it. For all of my clients and all of my prospects, I'll have an ongoing chat in my LLM instance and ⁓ I'll feed it my notes and the brand narrative that I create for the client right again so it has an understanding. ⁓ And then when I'm working on a project, I'll give it a very detailed prompt and I'll sort of start to write whatever I'm going to write, like if it's a deck or it's an essay or whatever.
Brett House (46:23)
Yeah.
Yep.
Joe Zappa (46:34)
I'll write a very rough draft or like an outline myself, right? So that it reflects my thinking. But then I'll say, know, A, polish this and B, to your point, bring in all of these great details that otherwise are just very hard to remember, right? Like it's like all the little product details and whatever, like it's especially hard for consultants because of course you're working. Yeah. But
Brett House (46:49)
Yeah.
Rio (46:54)
The key stats yet so much. Yeah.
Joe Zappa (46:57)
But like, yeah, LLMs are very good at doing that. so, but it lies in the specificity of the prompting and editing to get it right. And I think a lot of people are still not doing that very well. ⁓ But yeah, if you do get it right, it's very effective.
Brett House (47:05)
Yep.
Rio (47:08)
It's funny. I use a very similar process in consulting Joe, where like, let's say it's a new picture, new product, right? Like we'll create, you know, we have our own LLM that, you know, it's, you know, it's firewalled. So we're not, we're not sharing with the public ones, perhaps your point earlier, but like, well, I'll start it out. I have this new, this new project I'm working on and I'll, and I'll, and I'll train it. Just like you said, I'll make sure it has the background. I'll share information that I've researched and I'll, and if I need to, let's say, okay, I want to first start out by writing a point of view on this, my thesis for this project, right? About what I think.
Joe Zappa (47:20)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (47:37)
My hypothesis is what we're going to find. I'll train it on that. Okay, I want to write a deck on this and then, okay, here's what I'm thinking. Can you help me organize it? And you work with it and after like dozens and dozens of prompts, going back and forth, sharing information, it's really, really effective. And I tell people like, you should not be taking three or four hours to build slides anymore. You should have this honed to a point where it's taking you a few minutes. Clients are not going to pay for that anymore. It's totally changed. And this incredible tool, anyone who says LLMs AI is not really effective. I don't think it's using it right.
Brett House (48:08)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you should see my prompts. They're outrageous. I have like a thousand word prompts, right? And some people are like, I don't know if that's the right way, you know, where, and sometimes I'll do it verbally and other times it's just this thing, right?
Joe Zappa (48:14)
yeah, totally.
Rio (48:18)
I'll record a voice memo and I'll save it and get the transcript. I'll dump that in. It's incredible.
Brett House (48:22)
Yeah. Yeah. And like, and like it's, I mean, I think of us get like, have to kind of get obsessed with it to know how it works. And hopefully your brain doesn't change because of your.
But like just as an example, I'm building a P &L, right? It's like unit economics, it's profit and loss across the entire company, but it's super complex. And it doesn't get it right the first time, and this is the pro version of GPT, but it was something that I'd have an idea, be like, we should probably take this bottoms up versus top down. These kind of ideas that I'm thinking about, and I just vomited onto the...onto the prompt, right? Right before I go to bed, like 15 minutes later, it comes out with a completely new modeled spreadsheet with all that sort of stuff. That kind of stuff would have taken an accounting or finance team potentially two, three weeks a month to put together the level of detail that I created in like three days.⁓ You know, just because you know the right questions. to my, yeah, to all everybody's point here is that if you use it to its full capacity, it's incredibly powerful and it has a compounding effect. Each one of us becomes 20 people, 25 people, right? It's like, there's gonna be a billion dollar single person company before you know it. Yeah.
Joe Zappa (49:36)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the it's leverage, right? Like in the olden days, again, like labor was the primary form of leverage you could obtain where you as a more senior person would have an idea and then you have a team, as you say, of 20 people and they would go execute it. Because we know that the highest value work, it's the 80-20, like the highest value work is figuring out what are we going to do or what are we going to say. But then there's so much time that gets poured into taking what are we going to say and then like externalizing it, making it concrete as whatever it is, a deck or a NSA or what have you. And now you can you can come up with the concept in 10 minutes as a very experienced high leverage person. And then you can use the LLM to bring it to life and do the details. And that that's the that's the beauty of
Brett House (50:15)
Yeah, yeah, that's the hard time, labor intensive stuff, right? Let me ask you this is, and I think that we kind of prefaced it in the intro, the thesis Rio was like martech, data tech, ad tech. We've all been involved in this industry for a long time, longer than we care to admit. I stopped counting after 20 years. won't I won't be telling anybody that I've been in the industry for 30 years anytime soon. a lot of jargon, right? And you start to get, like there's a lot of acronyms, a lot of jargon, more acronyms than you can possibly count. In fact, sometimes I get confused with some of the CMPs and CEPs. How do you actually get organizations to go from that sort of product speak that, like within the walls of ad tech, bar tech, to actually speaking to in a way that your mom or your grandma would understand, that your clients will understand. Because oftentimes I find when you go outside of our walls, in our industry, it doesn't translate necessarily.
Joe Zappa (51:14)
Yeah. Well, I'm kind of two minds on this. So one is you'll hear marketing people say a lot, you know, we should be able to articulate this in a way that like my mom could understand it. And I don't always agree with that because sometimes it's like, does your mom need to understand a CDP? You know? Yeah, yeah. Like, like, exactly. Like it's like we oftentimes we sell like highly specialized like B2B technologies. And it's like, it's okay if it's a little more like abstruse than that.
Rio (51:28)
depends on your audience.
Brett House (51:30)
Yeah, she's not your ICP. Yeah.
Joe Zappa (51:42)
So that's one thing. However, ⁓ in terms of marketing, what I worry about is again, the number one thing you need to do is orchestrate attention. If no one's paying attention and if you're just getting into the nitty gritty and the technicalities from the jump, then what I worry about is no one will care that you exist and no one will be like reading your stuff or listening to your stuff. And therefore you never have the opportunity to get into the detail with them. And so I want companies to be able to...speak on two levels, right? To do the sort of higher upper funnel attention orchestration, and then to have that more specific granular technical conversation of need be. And so the second one is the one often to your point, B2B tech companies are already doing, because they're used to operating in that mode. The first one is often harder. And that's where I try to get them to take like what I often call a Hollywoodian like heroes and villains framework and think about, you know, those
Brett House (52:34)
Wait, hold on the first one is what the first one is the the why is that what you're talking like the the what is the first one just
Joe Zappa (52:40)
Well, there are two levels. The first level is ⁓ more technical, specific, getting into the product, whatever. But then this higher level is the communications level. The upper funnel level is, you know, again, what is wrong in the industry? Think about the industry as a whole, what's wrong with it and how it needs to change to better serve your customers and where it's going and try to position yourselves as the future of it. So can I give you an example? Think about like,
Brett House (52:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Rio (53:08)
Yeah, go for it.
Joe Zappa (53:09)
TV Scientific is a long-time client of mine that ⁓ inked a deal with Pinterest ⁓ in December. So huge win for the ad tech ecosystem for a $20 billion search platform to be investing in an independent ad tech company. And I think they do storytelling extremely well because, so to speak to these two levels. Okay, the product oriented sort of differentiation level would be them comparing to other companies and like the performance TV category that they pioneered and be like, okay, this is how we do like measurement and optimization and this is why it's better and whatever. But there's a much higher level sort of sweeping narrative they tell about that is basically like about the future of TV and the future of advertising. And what they say is like, advertising has historically been unaccountable, right? There's been a long era of unaccountable advertising. The classic, I know half of my ad spend is wasted, I just don't know what to have. We no, yeah, and we no longer need to accept that. And the reason that search and social have been so successful and have been eating the entire media ecosystems lunch ⁓ in advertising for the last decade plus is because they do speak to performance advertisers. And the only way for the rest of the media ecosystem in Hollywood and so on to compete with the search and social platforms eating their lunch
Brett House (54:02)
Yeah, yeah, wanna maker,
Joe Zappa (54:26)
is to make advertising accountable in performance and to herald this era of performance TV.
Brett House (54:29)
Well, yeah, well, well, to double click on that, they are able to do that because they have a data advantage. It all starts with them capturing the data. Yeah. And then they leverage that to, to, ⁓ I it's a data advantage. That's what the, why, that's why they're able to do it. Right. Cause they own the data.
Rio (54:36)
Or they have intent data, yeah.
Joe Zappa (54:45)
Right, right, but just,
Rio (54:45)
Yep.
Joe Zappa (54:46)
yeah, but just just focus on the messaging.
Rio (54:46)
But generally looking at advertising, mean, so much advertising is like, like, every way in the industry, we all, we all make fun of it. Right. I mean, so I think it's a good point show. Like, let's make it more accountable. In fact, Joe, Joe's episode, it's on the record outcomes error. That was you. Right.
Joe Zappa (55:00)
Yes, I did that.
Brett House (55:01)
my gosh, it came out of that. No, no. So Joe,
Rio (55:01)
All right.
Brett House (55:04)
you were hinting at something that's like, you know, it's the old, it's the old Steve Jobs thousand songs, you know, like I've got to like your record, your record collection in your pocket versus, you know, that's how the iPhone, that was the iPod. That was what was introduced. It's a classic sample. I've used it a thousand times in presentations, but it was introduced to the market. Steve Jobs said, for those that don't know the story, ⁓ you know, instead of saying this is an MP3 with, you know, and start naming the features and capabilities with this many gigabytes of storage and this many.
Joe Zappa (55:27)
Exactly, exactly.
Brett House (55:30)
They're like, this is your entire record collection and your parents record collection, maybe in your pocket, right? So it sort of bubbled it up to this aspirational, this is more than just ⁓ a piece of hardware that stores information.
Joe Zappa (55:46)
Exactly, Brett. That's what I'm saying is that the average B2B tech CEO, if you look at the TV side example, where would they start? They would start with, this is how our machine learning works and we have this amazing tech and whatever. And there's a place for that. But what saying is don't start with that. That's not the upper funnel. That's not how you get people interested. You get people interested by saying advertising has been unaccountable and that's why search and social have been eating the entire ecosystem's lunch for a decade plus. How do we change that? We usher in the era of accountable advertising. And then you get to ultimately the tech that makes that possible.
Brett House (55:59)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, this is the Simon Scenic.
Rio (56:15)
Yeah, start with a narrative a narrative. with a really powerful narrative that people can... And this is what can talk to your mom, right? Or your grandma, your parent, your daddy doesn't work in tech. I think this is it. I think you nailed it. It's like, yeah, you need to get the tech right, the specification in order to succeed in tech, obviously, right? Your product has to work, but why should people care? I think that message should cross over audiences and should be something that people can understand and can think this is important. Yes, and remember, it's a good one.
Joe Zappa (56:19)
narrative exactly.
Brett House (56:22)
Yeah. And remember. Yeah, yeah. And this was I always use the Simon Sinek Golden Circle, which is a great video on YouTube if people haven't seen it. And I think he's English. the idea that, know, most companies there's there's there's a circle. with two inner circles and the outer circle is the sort of what that's your features and capabilities, the number of gigabytes you have in your iPod. The inner circles the how, like how do you actually deliver some value to the end customer? And then the inner circles the why, right? And he's always like, start with the why. And most companies, especially in the tech space, start with the what. Then they start to work their way down. My question to you, and so that's all pretty standard stuff, right? Joe, Joe, you're like, yeah, yeah, I got a PhD in comparative literature. Don't tell me. So that's all pretty standard stuff. my issue, and this is the challenge that I've seen with marketers who have managed and run departments for decades, is that oftentimes ⁓ outside of the technical product marketers,
Oftentimes they don't know enough about the minutiae. And I sometimes use Picasso as like an analogy here, right? Like he had to master the classics before he could abstract the classics, before he could deconstruct art, right? My thing with marketing is, and tell me what you think about this, is that you need to master that, especially in today's world, the technical aspects without getting caught in the trees in order to tell the why story. Because if you don't know how this product works how it applies to a very complex ecosystem, there's no way you're ever gonna get to the why. And oftentimes they rush to the why, because they know that's where they need to start. And the why is so divorced from reality, right? You're like, and the sales team and the customer success people are like, I don't know what the fuck that means. Like, I don't know, like, that seems like marketing speak. That means, seems like surface level bullshit. How do you solve for that? And what's your recommendation to marketers?
Joe Zappa (58:29)
Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Well, maybe to tie it all back together, this is a case for the CEO as the chief evangelist and the person ideating the messaging, right? Because that is part of the beauty, ideally, of the CEO is that they do span commercial and product, right? And so the CEO is uniquely able to understand all the ins and outs of the product and the engineering while also speaking to the market and why this company exists and the commercial concerns. And then there's also, think, a tie into what we were talking about with the AI stuff. ⁓ Because maybe an advantage for marketers and communications professionals now that they wouldn't have had five, 10 years ago is they should be able to talk to an LLM that can be fed like product docs, and they should be able to like, be an auto didact and learn the ins and outs of the product and sort of have a conversation in a way that
Brett House (59:05)
Yeah.
Joe Zappa (59:31)
Five years ago, you would have had to get an engineer on the phone and maybe they're not great at explaining it or they lose patience with you. Yeah, yeah, they're like, they're like these frickin marketing people are so dumb. ⁓ So look, now us dumb marketing people, we can use the AI to learn and that's a beautiful thing.
Brett House (59:33)
Yeah. Or they don't have any time for you, you know, you're getting little bits and bytes of information. You're not getting...Ha ha!
Do you think it's the rise of, mean, think that, sounds to me like that's an empowerment play for marketers, right? Because to me, my whole value prop for like where marketers had the most value, it's like I move as far, and this is gonna be controversial, but I just have found when I've hired brand agencies, when I've worked with brand marketers, you know, that are disconnected from the ecosystem, the industry, and disconnected from the product, which is coming back to my earlier point they often, we hired one of my last company, Media Radar, and it cost a lot of money, and it was recommended by the private equity firm, this brand agency to work with. And I just, I took their outputs, and I just tossed them in the garbage. mean, sorry, sorry for the, if they're listening. No, because it was just, it wasn't close enough to reality, to the point. It didn't.
Joe Zappa (1:00:38)
Yeah, Brett, I think you're making two key points. One is, and this goes for anyone hiring marketers and communications professionals and agencies is ⁓ some knowledge of the sector is key, right? Like, you know, there's a reason that I built my firm in ad tech and then we expanded into sort of adjacent verticals, like, you know, a martech or retail tech is because like having knowledge of the ecosystem you're operating in is critical and makes you way more effective.⁓ You shouldn't be, you you're going to have to explain your business to a new employee or agency, ⁓ but they should come in with a baseline understanding of the industry, you know, and that, that helps a ton. ⁓ And then the other thing is just making sure that even if you're creating these sort of sweeping narratives and these highfalutin concepts, they can't be too distant from the reality of what salespeople and product people are experiencing. And that's why those people also deserve a seat at the table and they should be a part of that conversation when the messaging is being.
Rio (1:01:37)
Yeah, it's interesting too, Joe, about like those, the qualities that go into the people who I think are doing this well and are succeeding. And I think it goes back to, your point earlier about, you mentioned, you know, the humanities studying comparative literature, being good at writing and reading. And actually I think some of the best marketers have run into me, they might've even started out in tech, but they've spent a long time honing their craft. Maybe working with technical people, learning how to take that and translate it and communicate in a way that is a little more palatable and comprehensible for non-technical people. I think, even in consulting, think a lot of the best, I've seen a lot of the people who have been most successful actually having humanities background. And I think in the AI age, it's maybe even becoming more important, right? Because to your point, you don't need to necessarily sit down with a tech team for hours to understand the product anymore. You can get a summary from an LLM that's probably pretty good. I'm not saying there's no need for like sales engineering, but I think that...A person who knows how to think right and research very well under these tools is probably really well positioned for success, right? Like within and doing lots of roles. I usually think these skills, this background is more important now with AI. That'd be my argument.
Joe Zappa (1:02:49)
Yeah, think ⁓ aptitude for argumentation and reasoning, the ability to make a clear argument and to understand how a company is positioned in the space and to differentiate it, you know, that is what's most valuable. And then second would be subject matter expertise. And when you combine those things, which you should be combining if you're getting, you know, an agency or a senior professional, ⁓ you get ⁓ a powerful result. And younger people and junior employees, of course, you're looking for the first thing for aptitude and you teach them the subject matter but in more senior people are an agency you're looking for both and I would bet that you know Brett in the case of like that agency right they probably didn't have deep subject matter expertise and then that's the challenge.
Brett House (1:03:29)
Yes, yes, exactly Yeah, and I'm going to tie this back to because you said aptitude for what was it aptitude for critical thinking argumentation argumentation reasoning ⁓ and part of comparative literature. I'm going tie back to that because one of the things that I we had to take a rhetoric class. So I was a freshman in college taking it, you know, studying Cicero and how you leverage rhetoric to
Joe Zappa (1:03:37)
argumentation, reasoning, yeah.
Brett House (1:03:51)
promote, persuade ideas and it going all the way back to ancient Greece, right? And for those that don't know comparative literature, I just said we had to geek out on this a little bit, Joe, is that it really is about that sort of critical thinking and sort of cross audience translation in a way where you're translating something that might be culturally, not just literal translation, but cultural translation and interpretation of something that exists in one culture and in one language into another culture and another language. And that's what I gained from comparative literature as a major because you have to have a second language. Yours was French, mine was Spanish, although I had a little French thrown in there as well. But that was the hardest thing to do, to say, what is this in this context at this time with these people mean in this context, let's say a modern American context, in this time with these people. And that is the hardest thing about comparative literature is actually making it meaningful despite time gaps, people gaps, audience gaps, all that sort of, yeah.
Rio (1:04:54)
Well, Brett, learning how to think, learning how to think, learning how to reason, learning how to argue. mean, Joe, think you hit on it right there. And then, you know, now that we have Claude and other, other large English models that are really good at writing code. mean, it's like, and they're really good at writing too generally, but like, like how important is it going to be to be, to have a technical background, a feature? It'll be important, but I, I would almost argue that these, the skills we're talking about here are going to be the foundational ones that they're going to be.
Brett House (1:05:00)
Yep. Yeah.
Rio (1:05:23)
I think the most important in the job market in the future.
Joe Zappa (1:05:24)
Yeah, I mean, it's funny It's funny, right Rio? Because I think 10 years ago when I was graduating college, like comp sci was the huge thing. was like everyone was a comp sci major and it was like, just get hard skills, you know, just like learn how to code. And now like there are, you know, I don't think it's going away entirely. Right, exactly. Everyone's like is.
Brett House (1:05:38)
Yeah, totally, totally. It's the first thing to be disrupted!
Joe Zappa (1:05:47)
knowing how to code even that valuable anymore. think it's still of course valuable, but it's like, think generally you're right that we're moving in this more generalist direction at the moment where the tools have become so good that the general thinking ability, ⁓ know, intellect, reasoning, like these capacities ⁓ are what informs the impact of the tools. And so they're becoming more important.
Rio (1:06:10)
Yeah, remember there was coding boot camps popping up all the time. I'm not saying there aren't coding boot camps anymore, but I'm sure they've changed. I'm sure the coding boot camps is showing you how to use large language models to write code and then how to review it. Yeah, for sure. So I think it's really interesting. ⁓
Joe Zappa (1:06:21)
code or whatever. Yeah.
Brett House (1:06:27)
So long live the English and comparative literature majors, right? We're rising. Yeah, humanity's in general.
Rio (1:06:33)
Why, I think humanities in general, think getting, getting a well-grounded humanities, liberal arts education, right? Learning, you taking philosophy, learning how to write, learning how to do all these things, right? I think regardless of the major, I think, I think is probably going to be more important. And I, that's one thing I'm taking for this conversation is you both seem to agree, which is really cool.
Joe Zappa (1:06:51)
And I think, ⁓ guys, showing that you can, showing that you have those abilities, right? So the beauty is, ⁓ just like it's still rare for CEOs to leverage these first party communications channels to share their message, how rare is it, shockingly, to have a 22 year old who studied English at whatever school and is showing you they are thinking critically about anything, like just the world. It doesn't have to be like B2B tech. And I know because I hire these people, right? Like I hire junior employees who have that kind of background. And almost none of them can point me to like a blog or a newsletter where they're just like, hey, here's like me doing like critical thinking writing type stuff about, ⁓ you know, could be about TV or politics or whatever. just using the channels available to you to demonstrate those skills in a public form. I think is tremendously valuable.
Brett House (1:07:51)
Just throw yourself out there.
Rio (1:07:51)
I had, yeah, well had someone, talked about this last podcast, Brett, remember I hired someone with an MBA and an MA, think MS or an MA, who couldn't write, clearly, like, at all.
Brett House (1:08:01)
Yeah, that was my biggest value prop as an MBA is I'd have, we'd have these teams doing these like high pressure projects and it was accelerated so you had less time than normal to get these things done. You'd be working at three in the morning and then you had engineering and product and tech people. ⁓ It was a BU because there's a lot of MS, like MS MBAs and. ⁓They, and some of the stuff that they would give me, I always ended up becoming the master editor of our projects of what we actually turned in, because they would just give me this stuff where I'm like, it's barely like seventh grade English, or fifth grade English for that matter. Like, I'm like, you're really struggling. Like, did you ever learn this how to write a thesis statement? Right? And then you, and then.
Rio (1:08:42)
or a complete sentence.
Brett House (1:08:45)
Right and that is logical thinking of how you it's like you've got your thesis you have your three key points that that prove it out you elucidate on those and then you repeat it at the end you don't introduce any new concepts in the conclusion right and I'm like I learned that as a freshman year in high school freshman year in Longmeadow Massachusetts and I remember the teacher right and like those basic skills of just how to communicate effectively so people understand what you're talking about have kind of been lost in this... you know with the...
Joe Zappa (1:09:15)
Yeah, so I think ⁓ to tie it all together, if you do have mastery of those skills and you can use the channels at your disposal to apply them and put yourself out there and share your thoughts with the world, you can increase your surface area, increase your chances of getting lucky, right? Getting the right customer or the right employer in the door. ⁓ And that's true as much for entry level employees as for CEOs and AI just makes it all easier as long as you're using it correctly.
Brett House (1:09:47)
Yeah, well we had a little pause there due to some bandwidth issues but we can... Oh Rio, you were gonna say?
Rio (1:09:52)
But yeah, well, I guess. We're probably coming towards the end. think we're, you know, we're over an hour now. Um, so Joe, mean, I, I, in case anyone who's been listening, it's been a great discussion, by the way, this is kind of what we're hoping to have you on Joe. mean, like you're interesting guy, lots of, do lots of interesting things. It's a cool story, the business you've built and I, you know, I love this thesis. You know, we all do. Um, how can people get ahold of you? Let's say they want to find more, like connect, you know, obviously like tell people about your other pod, your podcasts you run, which I, which I listen to every week. Um, or, you know whenever you come out with a new episode. So I'd love to hear about that. How can people get a hold of you and how can they get a hold of Sharp Pen?
Joe Zappa (1:10:35)
Yeah, thank you so much. Email me at joe at sharp pen media.com or find me on LinkedIn, joe zappa sharp pen media. And I am the co-host of the open market podcast, which is about building companies in the advertising industry.
Brett House (1:10:48)
Yeah, and my last question before we end this, are you related in any way to the great Frank Zappa?
Joe Zappa (1:10:55)
You know, my dad claims that, but I don't believe he's to be trusted.
Brett House (1:10:59)
That's a very Frank Zappa like answer So hey, thank you Joe for being on this it's been a pleasure you know, I we had a lot of good creative conversation and ⁓ Looking forward to talking to you in the future and having you back on the show in the future. So everybody that said that's joined the show Subscribe to us on YouTube ⁓
Joe Zappa (1:11:15)
Guys, thank you so much.
Brett House (1:11:20)
⁓ Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We're out there with episodes at least every week if not more often than not. And stay tuned for the launch of signalandnoise.ai. The website's coming soon. We're hard on the backs of our web developers to get this thing out there. But a lot of great stuff coming down the pipe. It's almost there.
Rio (1:11:40)
It's almost there. A lot of great content from various creators, not just the two of us, but various creators who are publishing on the Cigal and Noise.ai platform. So look out for that. And thanks again, Joe. This is an awesome discussion.
Joe Zappa (1:11:54)
Thanks a lot, guys.
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