How to Use AI for Content Without Creating Slop with Eoin Clancy (VP Growth at Airops)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by Agendic AI.
I want to be the person on my team who actually knows how to build with AI, not just talk about it, not just use Claude to ask silly questions, but I want real output, something I can point to and say, I built that and it saved my team hours every week. If you want to be that person, check out this resource. My team at Optimizely is super smart in this area. They've developed a new AI marketing certification called Opal U. It's a five day live course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI. This is a structured hands-on program with just one hour a day for five days where you'll build three real AI agents that saves 10 hours a week. Plus you're going to learn five prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output, how to feed your agents the right context, how they write and think like you, how to connect them to real data sources so they're pulling from what actually matters to your business. And you'll do all of this alongside 50 other senior marketing leaders just like you dealing with the same challenges. And at the end, you'll present what you built, get feedback, see what others created and leave with 10 new ideas for what to build next. Plus 20% of Opal U graduates have gotten a promotion or a new job after completing this. That's pretty cool. So now's the time. Check it out. Opal U kicks off every Monday. You can apply right now, optimizely.com/exitfive.
Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones in your site, clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Cloud and ChatGBT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and Vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to vector.co to learn more. That's vector.co.
And if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them Exit Five, please.

**Eoin Clancy** (2:38)
See you.

**Dave Gerhardt** (2:40)
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Hey, it's Dave. So we just hired our first content engineer at Exit Five. Shout out to Marissa. And this conversation with Eoin Clancy is a big part of why. Eoin is VP of Growth at AirOps. We recorded this session a little while back, and it still holds up now, because we get into what a content engineer actually is and why you might need one. Three ways to know if something is AI slop or not, and what the bar for good content looks like these days, and why AirOps' best growth channel in 2026 is not something crazy. Webinars, good old webinars, 14 webinars in a quarter, ungated with a follow-up system built in Clay and smart lead that drives real revenue. We go deep on that webinar playbook, how they pick topics, how they source guests, how they track attribution, and follow up without being annoying about it. If you're trying to figure out how to use AI to move faster without tanking your content quality, this one is worth your time and I love webinars, so I'm excited about this one. Enjoy my conversation with Eoin.
Eoin, good to have you on the pod.

**Eoin Clancy** (3:51)
Yeah, glad to be here, Dave.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:53)
We were joking because we've done a bunch of stuff together and Dan always messages me, he's like, we should have Eoin on the pod and like for six months and I'm like, yeah dude, we have it, it's scheduled, it's happening. It's happening right now and I took a screenshot to throw it into Slack to prove it.