If content rules, why does it feel like there are 100,000 royal families?
In a world drowning in blog posts, videos, and AI-generated everything, content has never been more abundant—or more commoditized. So how do brands cut through the noise?
Today’s guest has a few thoughts on that—and more.
About Benjamin Shapiro
Benjamin Shapiro, host of the MarTech Podcast, has had front-row seats to the shifting landscape of B2B marketing. With millions of downloads, Benjamin has interviewed the best minds in marketing and watched strategies evolve in real time. From AI’s impact on content to the growing need for thought leadership, Benjamin is here to help us separate what still works… from what’s just noise.
Resources
MarTech Podcast: https://martechpod.com/
I Hear Everything: https://iheareverything.com/
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Boston, August 11-14, 2025. Register now: https://bit.ly/etailboston and use code PARTNER20 for 20% off for retailers and brands
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Don’t Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland – the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
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The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
If content is king, why does it feel like there are a hundred thousand royal families in a world drowning in blog posts, videos and AI generated everything? Content has never been more abundant or more commoditized. So how do brands cut through the noise? Today’s guest has a few thoughts on that and more. Benjamin Shapiro, host of the Martech podcast, has had front row seats to the shifting landscape of B2B marketing.
With millions of downloads, Benjamin has interviewed the best minds in marketing and watched strategies evolve in real time. From AI’s impact on content to the growing need for thought leadership, Benjamin is here to help us separate what still works from what’s just noise. Benjamin, welcome to the show.
Benjamin Shapiro (00:39)
Great, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:40)
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you before we dive in though. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background and your podcast?
Benjamin Shapiro (00:49)
You want the clean or the dirty version?
Greg Kihlstrom (00:50)
I don’t think we’re gonna check the explicit box on this, so maybe the clean version.
Benjamin Shapiro (00:54)
I’ll go, I’ll go halfway in between. I got drunk at a party and, after being a little over served in the suburbs of San Francisco pre COVID while my wife was eight months pregnant waiting at home, I sat in the front seat of my Lyft, you know, back when people decided between Uber and Lyft. Now it just seems to be Uber. And I was feeling talkative and, know, started, chatting with the driver.
And he said he was from North Korea. And I honestly corrected him. I was like, no, you’re not from North Korea. You’re from South Korea. Thick accent, hardly spoke English. He’s like, no, I actually defected from North Korea. And I was like, tell me that story. And so he went off and started telling me about how he defected from North Korea into China, got caught, got put into a slave camp, defected again after he escaped and was swimming across river with people’s like shooting at him and had to hike through.
three different countries and eventually defected to Silicon Valley and became a Lyft driver who was studying software engineering. And I was like, you got to tell this story to other people. It was amazing. And he was like, I want to do that, but I don’t know how I’m like, this is a great podcast. This is like right after serial had just sort of popularized podcasts. And he was like, yeah, I want to do one of those. I was like, cool. Here’s my business card, call me tomorrow. And if you do, I’ll record it and I’ll turn it into a podcast.
I didn’t think I was ever going to hear from the guy. was my Uber driver, My Lyft driver, right? So he shows up at my house the next day and I was like, hang on, I got to go buy two microphones. And that was my first podcast. It’s called A Long Road Home. And it was the story of Chole Charles-Rieu and how he defected from North Korea to the United States. And it was an art project. But going through that process of doing something creative that I just felt like had to
B in the world and a story I wanted to tell, I A, learned how to create content. I had to figure it out on my own. B, I had this asset that I wanted to figure out something to do with. So I started doing some marketing and found a marketing channel. so later on, a year or two later in my career, I was running up my consulting practice and I wasn’t really sure what to do as kind of at a crossroads of my career. And I was like, you know what? I did this podcast. Everybody seemed to like it. I feel really good about being able to tell
stories. I’m going to see if I could turn some of what I learned into a professional venture. So I launched the MarTech podcast, which grew like a bat out of hell. And I was an independent consultant helping, you know, Silicon Valley startups figure out their brand. And all of a sudden I had a media property and then my consulting practice and the media property kept growing and the consulting practice kept not growing. So I decided to double down on that and I was just selling sponsorships and over time,
I started getting some notoriety for the Martech podcast. People started coming to me and asked them to create podcasts for them. And so then it was a media business and a production business. And over time, the production business has sort of eaten most of the time. And now that’s really what I focus on. And that’s how I started iHearEverything and got here today.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:48)
Nice, nice. Wow. Yeah, that’s the quite quite the story starts with the story, right? So that’s that’s great.
Benjamin Shapiro (03:54)
we do. We just tell stories over and over again.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:56)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, yeah. And, you know, for those listening, definitely. Well, finish this episode first, but definitely recommend, you know, you check out the the Martek podcast. Definitely some some great, great stories there. So let’s you know, we’re talking about content. Let’s let’s keep talking about that. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, anybody listening to this, I’m sure is well aware we’re being flooded with content. And, you know, while some of it is is still really good.
It’s been commoditized and you’ve talked about this quite a bit as well. What do you mean when you talk about content being commoditized and how did we get here?
Benjamin Shapiro (04:33)
Content being commoditized makes it sound a little bit like it’s a bad thing and I don’t think it is. And there’s a life cycle to new content channels that takes a long time to unfold. I think of the sort of going back into content, when you say content, I think most people probably defer to blogs, written articles that are meant for SEO to get traffic from Google to their website. And so if you take…you know, that sort of mindset. You think about the growth curve of blogging. Blogging came out and all of a sudden there were some superstars, TechCrunch and sort of these well-known brands now that were like first movers that had, you know, sort of wild adoption and exponential growth. And then over time you started seeing the brands come in and saying, you know, we should probably do some blogging too. We can use Google as a marketing channel. And then all of sudden,
the landscape was flooded, right? Everybody has content, everybody has a blog, it’s table stakes, you have to. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not effective, even if everybody else is doing it, you have to do it or you don’t seem credible, you’re losing out on a marketing channel. And so I think we’re at the beginning of that adoption curve where with what I do, which we call it building media brands, I think a lot of people just think of it as podcasts. The definition of podcast is kind of changing, but with
Podcasting, it’s starting to become table stakes. If you don’t have some sort of way to produce media that is consistent, is providing humanization, making your brand seem human, you just seem like this old stodgy company. so like flooding the zone with this new type of media is not necessarily a bad thing. It still means that you should do it. I wouldn’t expect the exponential growth like, you the hustle or these sort of early adopters, maybe even the Martech in that group, Martech podcast in that group. But there still is a consistent growth channel that comes out of this new medium that provides incredible value in terms of building awareness, authority, trust, consideration, like all the things your brand needs to survive in the longterm. That’s what this type of media is great for.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:42)
So, mean, really, as you mentioned, I mean, it’s not early days. So like the the the standout may already be kind of established or whatever. But it’s kind of like table stakes. Right. Is that is kind of what you’re saying is like you kind of have to do that. I mean, doing doing content. Well, that’s a whole other thing. We’ll talk about we’ll talk about that some as well. But it’s kind of you you need to have a way to create content. And I would say to do it at scale with, know, it’s always like marketers are always being asked to do more with less. Right. And so, you know, that kind of brings to a I certainly we have to talk about AI on every show anyway. So let’s let’s get there early here. So how is generative AI maybe in some good ways, maybe in some less than than good ways. But how is generative AI contributing to content creation whether that’s overload or whether that’s just helping marketers do a better job and you know Where do you think it adds actual value for marketers?
Benjamin Shapiro (07:36)
As a co-pilot, not as a replacement. And how we use AI, our process is we ask everybody who comes on our podcast to fill out a form and give us information about who they are, what they want to talk about, what their background is, you know, do some work in terms of describing why you’d provide value to the audience, what you want to say. And then we use AI to analyze that, understand who they are their area of influence, how credible they are. And we score all of our applications to understand who is actually going to be our best guests. We built an algorithm and use AI to sort of ingest our data and then tell us, hey, we think that this person’s the best guest and this topic is the most relevant and interesting to your audience. You should approve this interview. We were doing that before. It’s just a great way to synthesize some of the manual process that we were doing. Again, it’s a co-pilot, it’s not a replacement.
Then once we decide who we are going to interview, we have all this understanding of who they are and we can pull in more data about their topic, their area of expertise. And then we take these templates that we use for like our interview scripting and our research, and we have AI do a first draft of our interview script. You had an open that was articulate about content when we started this podcast, we use generative AI to write our first draft of that.
And what it allows us to do is when we do our pre-planning meetings between our guests and our hosts, instead of saying, hey, what do you want to talk about? How are we going to do this? It’s like, hey, we’ve got this guide here. We’ve got this standard format of how we run our interviews. And here’s what we think we should talk about. Let’s edit this document. And we’re using it again to be our first draft writer. And then the guest and the host are polishing it. AI facilitates that. And then in the post-production, there’s another touch where we’ve got
this great piece of content that we thought through what we wanted to say, and we finally got together and had a good conversation. Now we’ve got this transcript and we can use that to distill down what the key points are, give it to our video editors saying, we think that this is the most interesting part of our content, write our, you know, omni-channel supportive text content. So your tweets, your LinkedIn posts, again, it’s a co-pilot. I’m writing my own LinkedIn posts, but I take a transcript.
I give it to LinkedIn. have a tone and style guide and I have it, you know, do a format with, hey, write a hook first and then write a controversial statement and then write the bullet points that describe what my philosophy is, what I said in this podcast, and then give some sort of call to action at the bottom. It drafts all that stuff for me. And so we’re able to sort of explode the places we could put our content and right size it using artificial intelligence.
Instead of just saying, I’ve got a 45 minute podcast interview, I’m going to put it in one channel. What I hear everything does and sort of the magic behind it is building the operating system that allows us to take this longer format content and right size it for every channel. So we’ve got the personal touch for LinkedIn. We’ve got the graphics for Instagram. YouTube obviously is the behemoth, the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
Each one of those channels needs different formats and styles of content and artificial intelligence helps you produce all that.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:43)
Yeah, and I mean, I think what you’ve touched on several times there is just the idea that there are there are human gatekeepers at all of those stages, too. So it’s like, you you’re not going to put something out there that’s just straight out of of Gen A. I. Maybe sometimes it does happen, but it happens based on guidance and very clear criteria. But most often it sounds like, you know, humans looking over it, they’re revising it, they’re making sure that it’s on brand and stuff. But all of the work that
you know, back in the day would take, I don’t know, a team of interns or a team of that, that frankly between you and I may or may not be as good as as generative. You know, I think AI can be really effective in some of these ways, save a lot of people time. And then sounds like, you know, the the team, the human teams involved get to be a little more strategic and make sure that things are pointing in the right direction rather than sifting through hours of footage for the right things that.
Benjamin Shapiro (11:35)
Yeah, you know where I think people fall down the most is they think once they write a prompt that they’re done. Yeah. And there’s this iterative process of prompt engineering. And mostly when you’re trying to harness tone and style. And I’ll give you an example, like with our cold opens for the MarTech podcast, the original prompt I wrote was like, start with a hook and then get some supportive data, do a web search and give me a stat that supports.
you know, the controversial statement and the hook and then provide a couple bullet points that support, you know, what people should do and then introduce the guest. artificial intelligence really struggled to make something compelling with that first sentence, the hook, right? When we’re sitting here and talking about content, the hook that artificial intelligence wrote, no matter how much I engineered the prompt was something like the world is changing and artificial intelligence is at the center of it. Right.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:27)
haha
Benjamin Shapiro (12:28)
That’s not novel, it doesn’t, AI doesn’t understand the context of interesting, controversial, eye catching. What it’s great at is Forrester said 83 % of people are already using AI, but 37 % of people are not seeing positive ROI, right? Like understanding and doing the refinement and search and finding compelling supporting data it’s really good at, but framing it, it isn’t.
And so we re-engineered our prompt to put that, hey, here’s the data upfront. And then I go and write, you know, sort of the statement of what I want to say. But if I had just left the prompt, I would always have vanilla uninteresting first line in my creative just stinks. And that doesn’t help from a content creation perspective. So you have to kind of always go back and refine. And so I think what people miss out on is the feedback loop when it comes to AI, which is I use artificial intelligence to create a prompt. I get something. I’m going to edit this, you know, discrete piece. And then they don’t think of, all right, here’s the feedback that I what I edited that you need to give that back to the prompt. So it continues to refine over time. And then you really start to be able to use it where it understands your tone and what you’re trying to accomplish. And so you should continue to work on the same prompts instead of always reprote.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:44)
I think we are so some of us, at least, are so willing to just hand off the like outsource the work to a I went to your point. It takes some some work. And I think it’s also people tend to forget that generative A.I. is only I mean, basically said this, but like it’s only telling us what we already know or what is already known. You know, it’s not it’s not inventing new things. It’s not coming up with amazing. It’s going to rephrase some provocative line from it heard from or read from somewhere else or whatever. It’s not going to, you know, I think that’s a great example of where humans are still needed. but but pouring, you know, over stats on the Internet to find the right ones. Like, that’s a great job for AI, because who’s got time for that? So it’s interesting how, again, I’ve often been
Again surprised at how willing people are to just say I wrote a prompt for that or give me a prompt for that and then they think the job’s already done so but yeah, I want to get to another part here, which is Kind of going back to the idea of you know, there’s a lot of content out there We’re being tasked with kind of to keep up. We’re being tasked with Creating more and more content. Certainly AI can help in areas there. How should we be measuring the effect of content. Again, there’s more competition, so to speak, but how do you look at measuring effectiveness of marketing content and attribution, all of that stuff?
Benjamin Shapiro (15:09)
Yeah, I think it changes over time. When we are working either on a new media brand or we’re kind of taking over responsibility for an existing, we’re doing a refresh. There are four stages that I walk our clients through in of what their expectations should be and the evaluation criteria changes for each one of them.
I don’t think that this is new news, but if you’re not consistently publishing and you don’t have a high enough volume to be able to get content out there to get a signal, you’re wasting your time, right? Publishing, it’s like a blog post. Nobody became internet famous by publishing one blog post. You have to consistently publish and over time it has compounding value. And so for the beginning sort of first quarter, all I’m really worried about is
Publishing consistency, getting ahead of the hamster wheel where you’re not just like this week we’re working on next week’s content. We try to plan six to eight weeks ahead. So we are always working on next month’s content. And so if something happens where a guest cancels or something like that, it’s not like, well, we have nothing to publish. We’re trying to get ahead of the publishing schedule for the first quarter. So just table stakes. Do we feel good about what we’re publishing? Do we like the quality? Are we saying the things that we want to say?
putting the content in the right channels so we can get a signal. Don’t even worry about whether you’re growing an audience for the first quarter. Just get the content out there and that way you will have something to evaluate. And if you can’t do that, well, it’s a sign that either you in-house or your production team are not, you’re not doing the job, right? You’re not getting enough content out there to get a signal to figure out if it’s working. People want demand and they want it, they want to capture, they want…
prospects, they want leads and they want attribution, they want it immediately and you’re thinking about it the wrong way. You should not be building a media brand. You should not be doing a podcast to try to get more value out of the 5 % of the people that are already in your market. There are other channels that are better for that, right? That’s what your Google ads are for. That’s what your direct outreach for, right? Like 5 % of the people that could buy from you are ready to buy right now. And if you’re relying on a podcast,
to get them through your funnel, you’re tripping over the starting line. The purpose of the media that you’re creating is to market to the 100 % of people, not just the 5 % that are in market, but the 100 % of the people that are in your TAM, right? The people that could buy from you. And mostly it’s focused on the 95 % of the people that are not actively looking to buy right now. They should already have knowledge of who you are. You should have credibility and hopefully you’re getting consideration, right?
What you did last year is affecting your funnel right now. The purpose of the media is to build awareness, credibility, and consideration for when you’re in market. And by having your content and building credibility and humanizing your brand and showing that you have industry authority, all of those things that matter and are really hard to track, like that’s what is going to impact the long-term health of your brand. So if you want to think about pipeline in the short term,
Creating media is not the answer. The reason why you need to create media is so you have a consistent way to stay in front of your entire TAM. So when they become in market, they know who you are, they like you, they trust you, and they consider your products. And so when we talk about the evaluation, first three months, TableStakes just getting the content out there. The next six to nine months is about audience development, right? You’re just building your audience and focusing on body count and things like downloads or YouTube views or social engagement. And then it’s in the basically the second year or the end of the first year, you’re looking at things like share a voice. I’ve been talking to these people for nine months now. people, are they talking about us more? And then, you know, sort of in the first part of the second year, then you start to see the down funnel impact of, Hey, we’ve been talking to these people for a year.
They were out of market, now they’re in market. How is that impacting our brand? So if you’re thinking short term about demand capture and you’re like a podcast is going to solve all of my demand capture problems and I’m going to figure out attribution, you’re running into the desert looking for water.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:17)
Right, right. Yeah. No, I think that’s such a good point. And and I think, you know, the the very first thing you said there about consistency, I think is so I think it’s so underrated and it’s so over, you know, probably for the reasons you’re saying, which is, OK, somebody they’re like, hey, let’s do a podcast. And, two months later, there are, you know, three episodes in, let’s say, because they can’t even keep to a, know, to a regular schedule. And they’re like, hey, we didn’t get any leads on this. Let’s you know, let’s
let’s bail or whatever. Is that just expectation setting from the beginning of like, this is the, is about the, marathon, not the sprint kind of thing. Or, you know, how do you, I would say it’s probably a leadership thing of like, did we get any leads from the podcast? And you know, the answer is probably no after three months, right?
Ben Shapiro (20:01)
Yeah. If you’re a CMO and you’re doing a content marketing and, and, and on some level of brand exercise and you’re expecting demand, you’re, you’re doing attribution based on demand generation metrics or demand capture metrics. What are you doing? the purpose of this type of marketing is not to capture the in market demand, right? You, there’s no click in an audio only podcast. Nobody’s pulling their phone out and clicking on the show notes but they just spent 25 minutes listening to you because they are clearly in your target market if they’re listening to your podcast, right? And now you have credibility and you’re the industry leader. So I think that there is a top down what you’re talking about, like a sort of an executive level understanding of the purpose of media where people fall down. They’re like, I need to test a podcast. So how do we get it up in three weeks?
so we can test it in six weeks to see if it worked. And it’s like, okay, I’m gonna write three blog posts and I’m gonna evaluate the overall impact of it on our brand in four days. It just takes longer than that. You need to consistently publish. You need to give it time to grow. Like people need to have patience. But on the flip side, if you look at the brands that are really thriving, right? They have, look at HubSpot, right? Everybody’s like, my God, HubSpot lost all this traffic.
Benjamin Shapiro (21:16)
I don’t think HubSpot’s upset about losing all their SEO traffic. And it was an intentional decision because they built the HubSpot media network. And they’re focusing on harvesting value coming from YouTube instead of focusing on non-performing blog posts. They basically abandoned a huge portion of their web traffic because they found another source to get media out there. And they’re using the podcast and the sort of thought leadership media to get visibility.
Obviously build awareness, nurture, all that good stuff. And then they’re mostly using YouTube as their demand capture level, their demand capture layer.
Greg Kihlstrom (21:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it makes sense. So as we kind of wrap up here, two things for you. I know we’ve touched on a little bit of this already, but you talk with a lot of marketing experts, a lot of B2B marketing experts as well. What do you think? You know, what’s your advice for them? What’s broken in B2B marketing today that needs fixing?
Benjamin Shapiro (22:12)
Yeah, I think we touched on a lot of it, which is understanding the timeline to maturity for a marketing channel. And I think that, you know, we work primarily with mid market, mostly B2B companies, and there is a growth ceiling. And there’s a sort of a typical trend of I found product market fit. I found a marketing channel. I dumped a bunch of paid media budget into it. Sorry, paid budget, not media.
I put a bunch of money into Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and I got my ads and now I can get the people that are in my market to become my customers and great, they’re happy and they’re retaining and I have a good business. But I can’t continue to dump money into LinkedIn because at some point I hit a ceiling and now I’m not targeting the people that are in market. So what do I do? And they hit this growth ceiling because they are relying on rented audiences, right?
They’re trying to rent LinkedIn’s audience instead of cultivating their own. And by continually marketing to your target market, whether they are in market or not, you will see the long-term health of your brand continue to grow. And so that takes time. That takes patience. And there’s this problem where all the CMOs are like, I’m in this job for 18 months. And if I don’t show
demand generation now, it’s gonna be 12 months. But the problem is in 12 months from now, when you’ve hit that ceiling, you’re like, I can’t pour more money into this existing funnel. It’s just spilling out of the sides of the funnel. So what do I do? And you’re now too late, right? You need to invest in your organic growth, your owned audiences early, because those channels take a long time to cultivate, right? It’s like growing a plant.
You can’t put a seed in the ground and expect food to be there tomorrow. You have to water it. You have to let it grow. And then you wait for the fruit to show up and then you can harvest it. And I feel like we are just in this economy where we want sugar. I want to take a bite and feel the energy right now as opposed to growing our own food. And that to me is really the purpose of media. And the problem is people just don’t have the patience. They don’t have the expectations. So they don’t make the investments early enough.
And then you get 18 months in, you’ve hit your ceiling with performance marketing, you can’t show growth and, uh-oh, I’m out of a job because I didn’t cultivate organic growth channels. Those have higher ceilings, even if they take a longer time to convert. And that’s the fundamental problem that mostly mid-market B2B marketers have.
Greg Kihlstrom (24:35)
Yeah, well, good, good insights there. One last question before we wrap up here. We could I could definitely talk about this for a lot longer. But what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Benjamin Shapiro (24:48)
I think the biggest, most important thing, and it’s kind like what I said with prompt engineering, is the feedback loop. we try with everything we do when we are publishing content to not just say, OK, it’s out there, but evaluate the content and then refine. And so whether that is, do we feel good about this? Should we modify our intro scripts? How does our client feel about the content? How easy is the process for them? We are nothing but systems thinkers.
And so we’re always working on trying to refine the system to make content production faster, cheaper, easier for our customers. And if you don’t have that feedback loop, whether it’s evaluating the performance of your content or the process, you never get better. And so for us, it’s making sure that no matter what we’re doing, we have some sort of feedback loop and we’re always constantly trying to tweak and iterate and just not rely and make the assumption that what works yesterday is gonna work tomorrow.
