Why B2B Marketers Need to Start Thinking Like Media Companies with Melissa Rosenthal

Melissa Rosenthal (0:00)

Hey, it's me, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt (0:00)

Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet in the Exit Five community, but it's confusing, it's a little bit overwhelming. Which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier versus what's just going to be another thing to manage, or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50-plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases, all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time, and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now, right? Agents have so much potential in using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that eats your week, so you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job. I'm into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing again. I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. optimizely.com/exitfive. That's optimizely.com/exitfive.

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That's webflow.com/for/exitfive.

You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're back. Another episode of the Exit Five Podcast. My guest on this episode is Melissa Rosenthal. She is the co-founder of Outlever, where she's building the world's largest enterprise media company. That's what we talked about on this episode for you, lessons in how to build a media company for B2B. We talk about how, look, the fact AI right now is commoditizing content, right? All this AI stuff has made it nearly impossible to stand out on product alone. And so what do you do? Well, one idea, one path is to go and build a media company. She has done this. She worked at BuzzFeed. She helped launch Cheddar. She ran a bunch of the brand and marketing initiatives at ClickUp. And her whole thing is all about being a media company, not in the way that I say it, not in the way of just write a blog post a week. I'm talking about, she told me she's sleeping four hours a night because she's just news jacking and figuring out what's relevant and happening right now in all of these different industries. And if you need a little boost in your content strategy, your marketing strategy, because you're tired of all the AI slop in your feed, I want you to listen to this conversation with Melissa and think about how you can apply some of these lessons to rethink content for 2026, 2027 And you can't just be pumping out listicles anymore. So enjoy this conversation with Melissa. Go find her on LinkedIn, follow her. You can see her whole content playbook play out in real time. This was a really good one. Get the notebook ready. You were telling me before that you moved to San Diego to work at ClickUp. And I have known you in my head as BuzzFeed gal. And now you're doing your own thing. I didn't realize you were at a ClickUp. Can you give me like the two minute career story? Who are you? How did you get here? What do you do now?