Paid Ads Playoff: Proven B2B Plays That Turn Spend Into Pipeline

**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 an AI search, no developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to 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. Well, 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.
Thanks for watching. We're live, we're back, we're live. It's a couple of minutes early, but some folks, this is a big deal. This thing is buzzing. I have had multiple people from Netflix, HBO, some of the biggest producers have heard about what we're doing here, innovating on the webinar format here at Exit Five. And I heard they're gonna be in the crowd today, but we're back. And today, we're talking about paid ads, because there's no such thing as free ads, right? I'm trying to just fill here for another minute, because it's 1.59 where I'm at. Are you on East Coast time?

**Jess Cook** (3:02)
I am. Michigan is Eastern time zone.

**Kenna Rooney** (3:05)
Never been to Michigan.

**Jess Cook** (3:06)
I can't believe. Oh, you would love it.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:08)
I know, actually.
I know, there's a whole, I could listen to this golf podcast, and they got all these, they're like, Michigan is like the most underrated place, the lakes, the summer. It's like Vermont, Vermont in the summer. Vermont, the rest of the year, I'm all set with, so.

**Jess Cook** (3:22)
Yeah, same. Yeah, I'm gonna be one of those people that has like a house in the south at some point.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:27)
Okay, I'm into that, Charleston.

**Jess Cook** (3:29)
Because I can't, winter is a little tough, dude. Yeah, yeah.
I have to say, I love that your team did this blitz, what, two weeks ago? And then you're like, it works so well, we're doing it again.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:44)
Yeah, double down, you know? And Marissa figured a bunch of things out, and here we are. The first one actually was pulled off in seven days, so we had more time to do this. Yeah, that's amazing. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're here. My name is Dave Gerhardt. I'm the founder of Exit Five. This is my co-host, Jess Cook. She runs marketing at Vector, a cool company in the space that I'm going to tell you about in a minute.
We do these Exit Five live sessions twice a month, but two weeks ago we hit on something. We have this really fun format, which Forbes has called it the most innovative webinar of all time. We now are the number one webinar company in the G2 category. No, so we call them Exit Five live sessions because our whole job at Exit Five is to help get you smarter about B2B marketing. Look, I don't take your time for granted. You certainly could be spending your time talking to ChatGPT or talking to Claude. But the benefit that we offer here at Exit Five is real marketers sharing real examples because there's a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge you can get. I can go talk to Claude and get a one-page marketing plan. But wisdom comes from people actually doing the job. And we've found that that's what marketers love. Marketers from the beginning of time have always kept a swipe file of examples. And people love seeing what other marketers are doing. So that's what we're back here to do today. This time the topic is ads. We are doing a deep dive on ads. We chose this topic because we know that that's something that every single person in B2B marketing is doing. Someone is doing something with paid.