60-Minute B2B Blitz: 9 Marketers Share Their Best Plays from 2026 (So Far)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search, no developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore, it's actually the first thing an AI agent is gonna read about your company, and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI Search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI Search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/four/exitfive.
That's webflow.com/for/exitfive.
Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Markup AI. AI has made it really easy to produce a lot of content, but producing content fast and producing content that's published ready are not the same thing. By published ready, I mean it follows your brand guidelines, it sounds like you, and it's a good fit for your audience. I'm seeing a lot of marketers right now running their content through a bunch of different AI tools trying to get to a final product, but by the time it comes out the other end, it doesn't sound anything like them. It just sounds like AI. And that's the AI slot problem, and it's why there's a growing sense of frustration with AI content right now. Markup AI fixes that. It sits in your content creation workflow, scanning and scoring your content against your brand voice, preferred terms and messaging standards before anything goes live. Markup AI even checks for AI visibility best practices and works directly inside Google Docs, so there's no extra tool or handoff. Grammar was never your hardest problem. Speak for yourself. The real risk is publishing AI content that's generic, off-brand or unsightable. True. Markup AI helps you catch that first, so you're always putting your best stuff out there. Go and check it out at markup.ai. That's markup.ai.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Here we are, The Blitz. The Blitz is live. We're one minute early, and I feel like there's also sometimes some people rolling in. So give me a shout. If you're here and here right now, give me a shout. Marissa's here, producer Marissa. She has done an amazing job pulling this together. The Exit Five crew is here. I love that. Making the teacher happy. Jessica, good to see you. Chris is in Charlotte.

**Spencer Rule** (2:48)
We love that.

**Dave Gerhardt** (2:49)
Emily Lord, what's up?

**Spencer Rule** (2:50)
Shout out to you.

**Dave Gerhardt** (2:50)
Dan Murphy's in the house. Organizer, hello.
Chaz, hey, what's popping? It's bumping in here. Houston, Toronto. Shout out to the greatest album of all time, Iceman. We could talk about that later. Look, we have a busy. This is going to be a crazy hour. I didn't have a tux, but I'm in my suit, looking great. Blue really brings out my hairline.
I'm really excited to be here. We had this idea maybe 10, 15 days ago. We wanted to do something different. So we know that the number one thing you all care about if you work in marketing is like, especially now because of all the AI stuff, it's like, show me real examples from real humans who are actually doing this. So that's what we have today. We have nine marketers with us. Each one is going to get exactly two minutes on the clock to share the best play they've run this year. This is all about real tactics, real results. We just did the prep all backstage. It's going to be awesome. I have this little buzzer aka instantrapairhorn.com, my favorite. Shout out to them, not a sponsor, just giving them a shout out. Everyone's going to come up. They got two minutes. When the timer hits zero, we're going to kick them off the stage. We'll do a quick intro, get the next person up. Then after the first round, we're going to vote and we have four minutes for the next round of five. At the end, everyone's going to vote for one winner. We want one winner here for favorite overall play. I'm going to make a $500, it should be $5,000 donation with this suit on, but for right now, it's going to be $500 donation with the charity of their choice on me, Dan FYI, that's going to go on the MX, you'll see that later. But first, I know a bunch of you here know about this, but I just want to plug this really quickly.