Get Millions of Views Without Paying for a Single Ad | Ariel Rubin (Air)

Tim Soulo (0:00)

It's not rocket science to promote your brand if you have a big budget for advertising. But what if you don't? How are you going to get attention? In my personal view, a true marketer is someone who can get people's attention without having to pay for advertising. And I have one such true marketer as my today's guest on Ahrefs Podcast, Ariel Rubin, VP of Content at Air, a digital asset management platform. He's the guy behind their hilarious marketing campaigns, and he even won two Webbys for them.

But most importantly, with Ares help, the company managed to triple revenue while cutting marketing spend by 90 percent, which is incredibly impressive and very interesting to dig into.

Ari, welcome to Ahrefs Podcast.

Ariel Rubin (0:44)

Tim, thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Tim Soulo (0:48)

I'm super excited to chat with you because you did so many creative things, and I'm very jealous because I always want to do more creative marketing at Ahrefs. Let's start from this. What was your favorite campaign during your time at Air? What was the most hilarious one or the one you enjoyed the most?

Ariel Rubin (1:07)

Yeah.

The thing I like about working at Air is that I never get to rest on my laurels. There's not a lot of opportunities to self-congratulate or really feel like we've won because we're just always trying to win more.

I never feel like I've made it with Air and I never feel like we're there. We won a Webby, but I don't know, we haven't won a Lion. If we win a Lion, then I don't know, I want to win an Emmy. I just feel like it's important for me and not just because it's important for me that we are seen and recognized as a creative force to be reckoned with because we are trying to speak and market to creatives who are themselves forces to be reckoned with. We want to be in the room with them and on the podcast with them. So I'm honored to be with you because you are one of them, Tim. And I think it's a...

Tim Soulo (1:58)

Thank you.

Ariel Rubin (1:59)

Yeah. No, 100%. So it's a cop out to say like they're all my children and I love them all. But I also have a really short memory because I've done so many now. I really loved recently the one we did with Maury Povich, the TV sort of, I don't know if you know Maury more. Yeah, the talk show host. Yeah, exactly. From the 90s and early 80s.

We did this whole bit about dating AI.

We built a set, like a Maury set. We were featured in the Hollywood. We got incredible earned media out of that. We were in the Hollywood Reporter. We were in the New York Post. We're in Fast Company. It was great. It was really like, I don't know. Again, I think for us, if we can be seen bigger than, if we can show up bigger than we are, again, that's sort of an ethos that we try to hold it there, that I'm really excited and proud of it. That was one that I felt like we were able to really show up much bigger than we are.

Tim Soulo (2:58)

So many interesting things to unpack. Okay, I'll start from the last one. Show bigger than you are. Now, actually, right now in the process of finishing a book, and in my book, I talk about the principle of kind of portraying yourself as more successful than you are. So this is the reason why SaaS companies typically buy out lots of billboards around New York or something. This is to show, hey, we can afford this. So you have kind of slightly different spin on this.

You create things that are cost effective, but which make you look like big and successful that you can afford.

Ariel Rubin (3:32)

That's right.

Tim Soulo (3:32)

Maury Povich, yeah, I have no idea who that is. I'm a Ukrainian who's been living in Singapore for the past 11 years. I'm out of context of, is it US.? Is it Canada?

Ariel Rubin (3:43)

It's American. Yeah, he's like any millennial, every millennial North American grew up with Maury Povich. He's like Jerry Springer, Maury Povich. There's this cohort of daytime TV talk show hosts that were really formative and for me, actually very formative. They were pre-internet celebrities in the sense that they were doing this real gotcha moments that are now very popular on TikTok and Instagram.

They were doing them early on when I was a kid, and so I grew up, we'd stay home from school and watch Maury Povich, and Maury Povich would be like, it was always like, the reveal was like the DNA test to see if someone was the father of the baby, and so that was always very, it was very tawdry and kind of fun and salacious, and so being able to work with, he's 86, and we worked with him, and he's an incredible man. He's a force, he's been in TV for 70 years.