I am always looking for ways to improve. Send me a text and let me know your thoughts! - Kevin

What if playing it safe is actually the riskiest marketing strategy of all? That's the provocative premise at the heart of my conversation with Udi Ledergor, former CMO and current Chief Evangelist at Gong, who shares the breakthrough strategies from his bestselling book "Courageous Marketing."

Udi reveals the counterintuitive truth that most marketers discover too late: following "best practices" (which he calls "boring practices") only delivers ordinary results. When you're competing for attention in crowded markets, ordinary is a death sentence. But there's an alternative approach that doesn't require massive budgets – just the courage to stand out.

From his journey taking Gong from startup to category leader, Udi shares tactical frameworks you can implement immediately. His "Punch Above Your Weight" strategy demonstrates how he created campaigns that appeared to cost millions while spending a fraction of that amount. Times Square billboards for hundreds of dollars? Super Bowl commercials for under $300,000? Udi breaks down exactly how he did it, and how you can too.

Perhaps most valuable is his insight on creating the psychological safety that marketing teams need to take creative risks. Drawing from research by Adam Grant and others, he explains how to balance creative experimentation with what he calls "process accountability" – ensuring all creative efforts align with business objectives.

For marketers drowning in a sea of sameness, Udi offers practical advice on carving out budget for experiments (he recommends 5-10% specifically for marketing tests), gaining leadership buy-in, and using customer conversation data to generate unique marketing insights. The content series "Gong Labs" is a perfect example – transforming pattern recognition from sales conversations into genuinely useful content that helped build an audience of nearly 300,000 LinkedIn followers.

As we navigate the AI era, Udi cautions against using technology merely to accelerate mediocrity. The truly human elements – surprising insights, unexpected angles, and genuine connection – remain the essence of breakthrough marketing.

Ready to take the boring out of B2B? Listen now and discover how to create marketing that doesn't just perform well, but stands out, sparks conversation, and drives extraordinary business results.

🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.

New episodes drop regularly with unfiltered conversations from the frontlines of B2B and tech marketing.

Catch the video version of the podcast on our YouTube channel.

👉 Subscribe, share, and connect with us at www.mightyandtrue.com

📩 Got a guest idea or question? Email us at kevin@mightyandtrue.com

🔗 Follow Kevin on LinkedIn for more insights and behind-the-scenes takes.

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I am always looking for ways to improve. Send me a text and let me know your thoughts! - Kevin

What if 90% of your marketing budget is being stolen right in front of your eyes? In this eye-opening conversation, Dr. Augustine Fou—MIT PhD and leading expert in digital ad fraud—reveals the shocking truth about how bots are quietly draining millions from marketing budgets, including those in B2B tech.

Having worked in digital advertising since the mid-90s, Dr. Fou explains how programmatic advertising created the perfect storm for fraud to flourish. Bad actors create thousands of websites with plagiarized or AI-generated content, purchase bot traffic, and sell ad impressions to advertisers at a profit. The fraud takes many forms: fake impressions, fraudulent clicks, form-filling bots that generate leads, and even attribution manipulation that makes ineffective channels look successful.

Most alarming for tech marketers is learning that performance-based campaigns aren't immune. "The bots will do exactly what you pay for," explains Dr. Fou. If you're paying for leads, sophisticated bots will complete your forms and solve CAPTCHAs, leaving you with seemingly legitimate but worthless leads. Even worse, traditional metrics like viewability and attention are easily manipulated by fraudsters.

Dr. Fou introduces a powerful alternative metric: "attentiveness," which measures actual human interaction after someone clicks through to your landing page. Unlike easily faked metrics, attentiveness captures real engagement through mouse movements, scrolling, and clicking—behaviors that bots typically don't replicate convincingly.

The conversation offers practical advice for protecting your budget: watch for suspiciously high click-through rates, monitor for leads completed in humanly impossible timeframes, and add invisible form fields that only bots will complete. The potential upside is enormous—companies could save up to 90% of their digital ad budgets by eliminating fraudulent spend.

Ready to stop throwing money at bots? Follow Dr. Augustine Fou on LinkedIn where he's published over 800 articles on digital ad fraud or at his company, Fou Analytics.

🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.

New episodes drop regularly with unfiltered conversations from the frontlines of B2B and tech marketing.

Catch the video version of the podcast on our YouTube channel.

👉 Subscribe, share, and connect with us at www.mightyandtrue.com

📩 Got a guest idea or question? Email us at kevin@mightyandtrue.com

🔗 Follow Kevin on LinkedIn for more insights and behind-the-scenes takes.

📰 Subscribe to Kevin's Substack at: Subscribe to Kevin's Substack at: https://kevinkerner.substack.com/

📰 Want more tech marketing insights? Subscribe to the Drag & Drop newsletter for fresh thinking, real talk, and tools that make your job easier.

www.mightyandtrue.com

I am always looking for ways to improve. Send me a text and let me know your thoughts! - Kevin

Ever wonder why some fast-growing companies hit a ceiling? The answer often lies in the transition from founder-led storytelling to scalable marketing systems. In this illuminating conversation with Kristen Brooks, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Octane, we unpack the critical challenges companies face when trying to scale beyond their founder's personal network and narrative.

Kristen reveals the painful truth many founders face: "The founder story is not one that everyone has the right to tell." This creates a fundamental obstacle when scaling sales teams who simply cannot authentically deliver the founder's personal journey. Drawing from her extensive experience at companies like Cisco, BrightSpot, and Bazaarvoice, Kristen shares practical frameworks for translating founder vision into repeatable go-to-market strategies.

We explore the stark differences between product-led growth and enterprise sales approaches, with fascinating insights into how messaging, channels, and customer interactions fundamentally change between these models. For PLG companies, the website becomes the primary sales channel, requiring different optimization strategies than enterprise selling with its complex buying committees.

The conversation turns to perhaps the most pressing marketing challenge today: how to effectively message AI features without sounding like everyone else. Kristen offers a refreshing perspective that cuts through the noise: "It can't be AI for AI's sake." She advocates for focusing on concrete benefits while simultaneously addressing privacy concerns that keep potential customers awake at night.

Whether you're a founder working to scale your company story, a marketer trying to implement effective systems, or a business leader navigating the PLG-to-enterprise spectrum, this episode delivers actionable frameworks you can implement immediately. Subscribe now to catch more conversations with the marketing leaders who are redefining how technology companies articulate their value in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.

New episodes drop regularly with unfiltered conversations from the frontlines of B2B and tech marketing.

Catch the video version of the podcast on our YouTube channel.

👉 Subscribe, share, and connect with us at www.mightyandtrue.com

📩 Got a guest idea or question? Email us at kevin@mightyandtrue.com

🔗 Follow Kevin on LinkedIn for more insights and behind-the-scenes takes.

📰 Subscribe to Kevin's Substack at: Subscribe to Kevin's Substack at: https://kevinkerner.substack.com/

📰 Want more tech marketing insights? Subscribe to the Drag & Drop newsletter for fresh thinking, real talk, and tools that make your job easier.

www.mightyandtrue.com