Lauren Goody

This Martechvibe report put words to a lot of conversations I’m having with CMOs right now. Most teams are not trying to chase the next shiny tool. They’re trying to make what they already have actually work together. Too many platforms, too many handoffs, and not enough shared data. When marketing shifts from experimentation to execution, those gaps show up fast. Progress depends less on adding technology and more on simplifying how it’s run and measured. I highly recommend reading! https://lnkd.in/eZTES875

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Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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Rand Fishkin just mass-published research that should make every CMO rethink their AI visibility strategy. His team ran the same prompts 100 times across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI. The finding? Less than 1 in 1,000 chance of getting the same list of brand recommendations in the same order twice. If you're paying for reports that say "Your brand ranks no.3 in ChatGPT for this query," you're paying for noise. But here's where it gets interesting. I believe Rand went into this research trying to prove that ALL AI tracking was a waste of money. He came out with a more nuanced conclusion: ranking position is meaningless, but visibility percentage is statistically valid. When Bose showed up in 77% of headphone recommendation responses while competitors appeared in 38%, that gap represents something real. It tells you which brands are in the AI's consideration set and which ones aren't. LLMs are probability engines by design. Yes, you can go ahead and ask Claude or ChatGPT about it and they'll confirm that every response is a weighted lottery drawn from training data and retrieved sources. There is no "true ranking." There's only frequency of appearance. So what does this mean practically? - Stop chasing position. "We moved from # 5 to # 3" is not a real metric. - Start measuring share of voice. How often does your brand appear when someone asks about your category? That's the number that matters. Interrogate your AEO/GEO vendors. Ask them how many prompts they're running per query cluster. If it's less than 60, the data isn't statistically meaningful. If they can't explain their methodology, walk away. Rethink what "optimisation" means. You can't game an LLM like you gamed Google in 2016. AI visibility comes from being present everywhere the model learns from: earned media, Reddit threads, review sites, case studies, podcasts, third party mentions. It's brand building, not technical SEO. The companies winning in AI search are the ones showing up consistently across the sources that feed these models. Full research from SparkToro linked in comments. Worth the read.

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Large enterprise CMOs are facing a critical challenge: Drive AI transformation while doing right by the teams that built your organization. The C-suite wants AI transformation yesterday. Their teams—many with decades of institutional knowledge—are skeptical, exhausted, or both. Here's what I keep hearing: "I know we need to move fast. But I can't just blow up my team in the process." These leaders aren't stuck because they don't understand AI. They're stuck because they understand people. They need a plan for that first and foremost when the org gets to a certain size. They know that legacy expertise is still valuable and long-tenured employees deserve honesty about what's coming, not false promises. Transformation that breaks trust isn't really transformation—it's just chaos with better tech. This is the real leadership challenge of AI transformation - navigating the human complexity of change in organizations where relationships, tenure, and culture run deep.

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If you couldn't make it to Las Vegas for #CES2026, ADWEEK just published the highlights from my conversation with Jenny Rooney. 👉 https://bit.ly/3NmAiai In the piece, we preview the AI Disruption Index, Moloco’s new research with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which maps 15 industries into four strategic realities. When 75% of consumers believe LLMs help them find better deals than they can find on their own, AI isn’t just optimizing discovery. It’s replacing it entirely. With the AI Disruption Index, we wanted to give brands a clear, data driven way to understand their exposure to AI driven disruption, based on the strength of their customer relationships. Check out the article for the initial breakdown, but stay tuned for the deep dive when the full report releases on January 21st. #AIDisruptionIndex #MarketingStrategy

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Product Marketing is one of the hardest roles to get useful feedback in. The work sits in the connective tissue of the company between Product, Sales, Marketing, and the market. Which means feedback conversations often default to vague comments like “Great launch” or “Sales isn't using the deck.” In one of my current fractional engagements, we’ve been talking about what PMM feedback should actually look like, the kind that helps product marketers sharpen their judgment, influence, and impact. So I wrote about the PMM review you actually want and the questions you should ask to narrow your reviewer's imagination. https://lnkd.in/ggEb8zgU #productmarketing #gtm #b2bmarketing #marketingleadership

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“When you lead with a continuous brand-reputation story and product framing, every marketing budget dollar compounds positively for the organization. When you’re acting tactically, you’re just buying temporary marketing metric spikes that won’t last and will require more budget to stoke the flame and keep it from burning out. The CMOs winning right now aren’t choosing between brand and demand. They’re sequencing the marketing intelligently: they make the brand story land with prospects, then scale it reliably. Demand gen gets you reach. Brand and product marketing make that reach matter.”

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Can’t say I agree with everything here, but these 2 points reflect reality. 1. Brand and Product Marketing are key levers of growth in 2026 (& beyond). 2. Demand gen works best when it amplifies a well-defined story and sharp product positioning. Without that, it just makes mediocrity louder to the prospect.

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I love conversations like the one I had with Joe Chernov! We examined the nature of the modern CMO role, how leaders need to think about strengths and weaknesses, and the reality behind the short tenure that often comes with the role. If you're a CMO, or aspire to become one, this is an episode of Insights Unlocked that you won't want to miss.

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Most B2B product marketers underestimate emotion as a differentiator. We fall into the trap of thinking emotion doesn’t influence rational decisions. But research shows that up to 95% of decisions are made subconsciously and emotion is the fastest way to influence those instinctive choices. In B2B, we actually have more room to make this work. The average purchase takes around 10 touchpoints, which means plenty of chances to move beyond product features and tell a compelling story about the value your product creates. I break this down further in my latest article on how emotion captures attention. Link below. https://lnkd.in/ehJDsp_k

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