Influencer Marketing, Podcasting Strategy, and Brand Driving Demand with Jess Cook (VP Marketing at Vector)

**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 agentic 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. Team at Optimizely is super smart in this area and 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 gonna learn five prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output, how to feed your agents the right context so 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 Claude 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 see ya.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Hey, it's Dave, Jess Cook is one of the speakers that you're gonna hear from at Drive 2026, where she'll be leading a session called Baby Got Brand, the new early stage marketing playbook. I love that. So we're running back a conversation that I had with Jess earlier in this year, January, I think it was. She's VP of Marketing at Vector, where she once spent $12,000 on seven micro influencers and generated a million dollars in pipeline as a marketing team of two. She talked about that. We get into how she ran that influencer campaign, the whole influencer program that they run at Vector, why she stayed hands-off with the creators, how she tracked results without a demand gen background, and what it takes to grow from a content leader to a VP of Marketing. If you're an early stage marketer trying to figure out how to do a lot with a little, this one is worth your time. Enjoy my conversation from earlier in the year with Jess Cook. Jess, tell me what is Vector?

**Jess Cook** (3:47)
That is a great question. First, I have to say, I'm realizing a years-long dream right here. I need you to know that.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:56)
All right. Go ahead. I'll listen. I'll take it.

**Jess Cook** (3:59)
I've been listening for years. It's been like a legit, like if I don't do vision boards, but like if I had a vision board, if you like the DJ show, got to be on there someday.

**Dave Gerhardt** (4:08)
Man, that's so cool.