A New Dawn for the Marketing Industry
We can't go to market the same way we have for the past 10 years. The old playbook no longer works. Successful GTM in 2024 and beyond is centered around audience-building. In this keynote from Goldenhour 2024, Anthony Kennada lays out the future of marketing, the role of content, and how it's all centered around owned media.
(cheering)
Please welcome to the stage,
Anthony Canada, the founder and CEO of Audience Plus.
♪ Now, free ♪
♪ Everybody ♪
♪ Now, free ♪
♪ Jump roughly ♪
Welcome, welcome to the first ever Golden Hour.
How's everyone doing?
All right, good, good.
Notorious VIG.
Jay-Z, Nas.
What do they all have in common?
Well, they're all from right here in Brooklyn, New York.
Also, they would have all hated hearing me rap.
So my apologies to the pioneers.
Do you think Big Daddy Kane ever wondered
what rhymes with nurturing leads?
Probably not.
I think I am to wrapping what NFTs were to art.
Seriously, we are thrilled to be here in Brooklyn.
This is our inaugural event.
And like the Beastie Boys, we haven't slept much,
but trust me, it will soon be, as they say, time to get ill.
Hopefully some of you guys get that reference.
While everyone else is hosting their conferences
across the river in Manhattan,
we couldn't feel any more at home here in Williamsburg.
Even if we did name the event Golden Hour,
and it's been cloudy with a chance of rain
and the forecast this evening ever since we moved in.
So don't worry, dinner is on a rooftop,
and we opted for hors d'oeuvres instead of umbrellas.
So let's just happen in Scottsdale, they said.
Anyway, we should also just get the elephant out of the room
before we get started.
Audience Plus is a startup very early in our journey,
and putting together something like this
is not easy on the budget.
So with this in mind, if you find yourself
without a ride after the conference,
keep an eye out for me on Uber.
I have five stars, all my passengers getting mints.
Now, I'm sure when you first heard about Golden Hour,
you all wondered the same thing.
Does the world really need another tech marketing
conference where a bunch of people get together
to talk about their Tesla Cybertrucks,
and how AI can eventually make cold plunges even colder?
Again, probably not.
But if we're using the same status quo definition
of conference, then the world probably
doesn't need another one.
Still, I believe that our community needs something
right now, something that's different than the status quo,
and the traditional vendor events that many of us
have attended year after year.
We need a space where we can break out
of our LinkedIn feeds and Slack channels
to draw inspiration from new ideas,
not just recycle the same playbooks time and time again.
We need an onsite environment that is more intimate,
that enables those attending in person here
to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones.
And the open bar won't hurt afterwards as well.
(audience laughing)
We need an inclusive digital broadcast
that goes beyond a basic live stream
to help educate and inspire a global audience.
And we need a shared experience that demonstrates
the power of good marketing, not just by what is shared
from the stage here, but what is felt by every attendee
throughout the event.
No pressure to the audience plus marketing team at all.
(audience laughing)
But the truth is that in my 15 years of working in SAS,
I've never once attended an event like this.
And so Golden Hour is our attempt to interrupt the pattern
and introduce an event brand that
makes marketers feel relevant and inspired and prepared
for the next chapter of our industry.
And today is really just the start.
So we could make Golden Hour happen alone.
There's a fine line between Coachella and Firefest.
So I wanna give my sincerest thanks to our partners,
especially Vimeo for their support.
Thank you so much for everyone that helped make
Golden Hour happen this year.
So thanks for the assist.
During my seven years leading marketing
for a company called GainSight,
I saw firsthand how an in-person gathering
can spark a movement.
Yes, even in enterprise software.
In 2013, we had 300 early pioneers in customer success
attend our first industry conference
in San Francisco called Pulse.
By the way, this picture was taken right before
the fire alarm went off during the opening keynote.
So we're about 10 minutes in and I'm happy to announce
we're off to a better start so far.
But years later, Pulse exploded into a full-on media brand
for the customer success audience
with 6,000 attendees at Moscone Center,
annual sister events in Europe and Australia,
virtual workshops, in-person communities
in 50 cities across the globe.
One year, we even had a Ferris wheel.
Customer success became a movement
and it all started with a few hundred people
gathered in a room just like this one around a new idea.
And I see that same opportunity for us
or our marketing community gathered here in Brooklyn
in the thousands that are watching online.
So each of you today here in person
received a commemorative golden hour pin
marking your attendance today.
I'd encourage you to hang onto it
and wear it at future events
and really kind of having that almost like symbol
of being one of the first,
being the early pioneer in this movement.
At GainSight, we had our conference attendees years later
wearing lanyards covered with our entire pin collection,
looking like a very cool TGI Friday's waiter.
It was always so fun and just so rewarding
to see who the OGs were.
We've been trying to be very intentional
about how we designed this agenda
really around this idea of inspiration, education
and connection.
And we believe that shared experiences like Golden Hour
can really bind us together
but also play an important role
in not just the development of an industry
but our very careers within the industry.
Frankly, I don't think it could come at a better time
because as I'm reflecting on just sort of my career journey,
I don't think there's ever been a time quite like this
where an entire profession is being reinvented
and this reinvention is happening
when most of us are pretty tired.
Anyone else here feeling tired?
Not in a coffee, not hitting jet lag from travel kind of tired,
like a deeper existential tired.
But look, if we're going to move forward,
we first have to address some of the very real trauma
that our industry has experienced over the last five years.
Is fatigue, exhaustion, increase stress?
These are all symptoms that could run wild
if we don't identify and process the root cause.
So if you'll allow me, let's relive the trauma
for just a few minutes just to put things in context.
Remember 2020?
We dealt with the onset of the COVID pandemic,
lockdowns, the move to remote work.
They need to figure out how to make an impact
through seasons of uncertainty.
Remember walking one-on-ones, infinite Zoom windows,
virtual happy hours?
We had to enforce new boundaries
between our professional lives and our personal lives.
We had to somehow find a way to hit our pipeline targets
while also figuring out an entirely new way of working,
all while operating under anxious thoughts
and a very real threat to our health and safety
and those of our teammates and those that we love.
We didn't know what was gonna come next
as the world was opening up.
It'll be unexpected happened.
Prosperity, zero interest rate policy,
crypto millionaires, the post-pandemic boom
led to an unnatural set of growth for a lot of SaaS companies.
Marketing budgets were flush with cash.
Thousands of companies were funded with valuations
that reflected record multiples
and the industry went on a hiring and buying spree.
And in the name of remote work,
we hired people from across the globe
for many companies, growth came pretty easily.
Whew, this could last forever.
Wrong.
(audience laughs)
SaaS market corrected.
This latest snapshot from Bessemer's Cloud Index
shows the peak and trough of public SaaS valuations in blue
relative to NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones.
And what's worse than the data visualization here
is the very real whiplash that our profession experienced.
How again, we had to go back to the drawing board.
We were told by our CFOs to find a path
to two years of runway, which meant almost universally
taking a massive haircut on the marketing budget.
For many of us that required a devastating layoff,
or two or more, that affected very real people.
Many of us personally impacted.
In a recent survey of CMOs that we conducted,
44% shared that they now have less resources
to achieve their revenue plans
than they had in the previous 24 months.
78% believe that expectations on marketing
to deliver growth are even higher
than the previous 24 months.
And 44% reported lower team morale
over the last several years.
So now, as we look to gather our footing,
to execute on this efficient growth charter
that we've been given with our leaner teams,
we're leaning on the marketing tactics and playbooks
so we've executed well for our entire careers,
only to find that these playbooks no longer work.
Welcome to the inspiring keynote, everyone.
What do we do?
How do we move forward?
The silver lining on trauma, pain, and suffering
is that it builds perseverance.
And this is just as true at work
as it is in our personal lives.
You don't just go from suffering to okay to success
at the flip of a dime.
But psychologists say that there's one powerful
emotional construct that can help accelerate
the recovery process better than anything else.
Any guesses what that is?
Hope.
Hope can transform even the most acute trauma
into a beautiful story.
Hope gives us something to hang on to,
to look forward to beyond the current struggles
of our day to day.
We all need hope in something,
whether that's in our careers or in our personal lives.
Otherwise we're just going through the motions.
And who better than marketers than to create
a sense of optimism, to inspire not just ourselves
but our teams, the rest of the company
and even the audiences that we serve.
But before we turn to inspire others,
we have to put our own oxygen mask on first.
And that's what today's about, finding our hope.
And together, the co-author,
the next generation marketing playbook
that allows us to make an impact on like ever before.
So with that as our goal, with that as our task for today,
let's zoom into the tactics just for a little bit.
There seems to be a consensus that the two decade old
playbooks that we've all been executing
are just no longer working in the same way.
In fact, it's almost become a bit of a meme
to post this on LinkedIn and to say that,
call it marketing automation, inbound marketing or whatever.
And by the way, I am certainly not knocking those strategies.
They've served us well for many years.
But a lot's changed over the last five years,
just as we walked through, almost certainly over the last 20.
We have a session coming up this morning,
we're gonna dive deeper into this topic,
but let me propose the changes that I've observed
that have made this statement true.
First, the ability to capture the attention
of our buyer audience has become more difficult
than ever before.
And sure, there are many more companies
that are now competing for that very limited attention.
But our very brains have been rewired
by the proliferation of new content formats on social media
that literally create an endless rush of dopamine.
Scientists actually have a name for this phenomenon,
they call it TikTok brain.
And it has literally narrowed our collective attention span
as a society.
So how can the old playbook around gating ebooks
and white papers compete with the instant gratification
in dopamine reward of a short form video asset
on your LinkedIn feed?
Who, by the way, just release their own TikTok-like feature?
All right, so buyer attention is more scarce,
what else has changed?
Well, our relationship with social media has changed.
We know these platforms are important,
we have to be where our audience is,
we have to compete on that battlefield for attention.
But I think what we're waking up to is this idea
that the intentions of these platforms
are misaligned with our own.
X has been unapologetic about their active suppression
of certain links on their platform,
most famously sub-stack.
The LinkedIn algorithm changes every few weeks,
impacting our reach.
TikTok is closer than ever to a national band
here in the United States.
And I think what we're learning on these platforms
that there sits between us and our audience,
a third party algorithm that we don't control.
It's throttling our reach and throttling our distribution
into our very followers.
And since the underlying business model
for these platforms is around advertising,
their incentives are never gonna align
with our own.
So what's really interesting is the consumer
and creator economies got wise to this misalignment
much earlier than we did in B2B.
And companies like Substack and Patreon
have convinced the industry that you need to own
that relationship with your audience
in order to be successful in driving outcomes through them.
And that's an important future for our industry as well.
Let's look at another change.
Under the CFO call for efficient growth,
everyone had to run the analysis to figure out
which channels were more effective and efficient than others.
And the data shows that paid media typically
will represent the largest line item
in the marketing programs budget
and also one of the least efficient marketing channels.
And it's no surprise when the red pen comes out
to look for some cost savings,
it's the paid media budget that's targeted first.
By the way, this is not to say that digital advertising
is dead.
I actually think paid as a very important role
in the future of B2B marketing.
But the reality is that even for companies
that are doing this really, really well at scale,
it's getting harder to find efficiencies on that spend.
And so it's something that we have to be paying attention to,
which will rethink how we deploy paid dollars
as this efficiency focus is here to stay.
One last change.
Legislation around consumer data privacy
has gone into effect this year.
If you've guys been following along,
third party cookie restrictions for Google Chrome
went into effect for 1% of Google Chrome's users
on January 4th and will now be activated
to the rest of the customer base in the second half of this year.
So that's 68% of the internet, I think,
running through Google Chrome.
Google's also implemented email security mandates
that go into effect this in February
or went into effect, excuse me.
We have more headwinds than ever before to reach our audience.
And if you want to peek into the future, by the way,
on the legislation side, check out the afternoon workshop
on building an Amia demand engine with Tim from Yo Yaba,
who runs the largest digital marketing agency
in the Dach region.
And Dach is typically one of the most regulated markets
for digital marketing.
So that'll be a good session to consider.
This is a lot of change.
There's a lot of change to process
and a lot of challenges to the execution playbooks
that we've built our entire careers on.
So how do we respond?
What do we do?
And that's, again, the intention of what we're going to be
working through, because I believe that there's a new dawn
coming for the marketing industry.
And I want to share with you the hope that I see
for where we're headed.
Hope for how we can lean into these challenges.
And in doing so, come out the other end
as a stronger and more impactful marketing practice.
Let me show you what I see.
We know that content is the oxygen
for the marketing flywheel.
However, we have to evolve our intention
away from producing content for algorithmic value
or cheap conversions, the content that's actually produced
for human value.
And this means mastering formats beyond the written blog post,
which is super important, we'll continue,
embracing editorial writing, video, podcasts,
and other live streaming and other media formats.
It means balancing long form and short form production
to capture attention.
And I believe that in addition to all of the upskilling
that's currently happening on internal content teams,
creative agencies have a huge role to play
in helping to accelerate the progress into this new kind of era.
We have to be active in rented spaces like LinkedIn, YouTube,
and others, but we have to realize
that we cannot build for those channels alone.
Think about your brand as a network,
the official home for conversations, thought leadership,
and community around your point of view.
And a lot of that content will be produced by you and your team.
A lot will be produced by incredible creators, influencers,
subject matter experts who add both credibility and distribution
to your network.
We need to evolve this legacy idea of digital conversions
into building an owned audience of subscribers,
adding value and creating resource for the 95% of our audience
who's already paying attention, but may not
be in a position to buy today.
And by the way, let's not abandon the demand capture
kind of motions to get the 5% who are in market
through the funnel.
For too long, we've over indexed on the 5%
at the expense of the 95.
And that direct first-party relationship
means no third-party algorithm that's
sitting between us and our audience throttling our reach
in the cost of distribution begins to approach zero.
We need to move past pushing all digital conversions
into an automated and robotic nurture sequence.
And instead, start curating exclusive value
and intentional experiences just for our subscribers.
By doing this, we're giving our unknown audience--
folks that haven't yet subscribed-- a compelling reason
to do so.
But more importantly, we're delivering real value
to our subscriber base who are coming to us to not just
buy products, but to learn, to connect, to belong.
And by embracing all these new changes,
we're going to be afforded the opportunity
to look beyond the limitation of web analytics data,
anonymous aggregates of views and listens and impressions,
and to a world where we can understand and defend
the actual impact of our content on revenue,
using real first-party data.
And the impact of our efforts can now become known,
not just inferred.
And we can reinforce our seat at the table
and enrich our conversations with sales, customer success,
product, and our other partners across the company.
And as we capture more and more of this data
around our audience, across both our own services and rented,
we'll be in a position where we can run machine learning
models against our own proprietary data
to help inform production decisions.
What topics should we be creating content around?
What formats?
How do we distribute it in one channel?
What creators should we be partnering with?
What if we had access to the same engagement data
that YouTube and Netflix had on us?
We'll move beyond random acts of content
and leverage actual data on our audience
to tune production and distribution decisions outcomes.
So this is the hope that I see for marketing.
By the way, this may sound radical or unproven to some,
but realize that this is already happening
in the consumer, e-com, and creator economies.
We're just late to the party.
And I think that the SaaS businesses in the room
who are the first movers in this strategy
are going to be both on the right side of history
and also have a head start on the competition.
And this is a strategy, personally,
that I find to be pretty inspiring.
And it really has the potential to unlock
a new level of creativity in B2B marketing
that many of us have been desperate for in years past.
We've referred to this collection of strategies
as owned media, nothing new in that terminology,
but one that's taken on new meaning and importance
given the realities of our go-to market today.
Just over two years ago, I saw these trade wins
of our industry starting to shift
and realizing that there wasn't a company in the marketplace
that was championing owned media,
building the technology to help marketers
operationalize the practice,
but also championing the movement with content,
community, and this exchange of ideas.
So I stepped down from my CMO career
and launched a company called Audience Plus.
And we've been transparent from day one
on how we view our role in the marketing industry.
First, we're building a pioneering software platform
for owned media.
We're also convening a community of marketers,
you, through Golden Hour,
to co-author the new execution playbook for our practice.
And also, we're creating a content and media network
of our own full of best practices
to inspire, educate, and equip the market.
So a quick word on each.
Now we believe that the new marketing playbook
requires a new type of platform to operationalize it.
And our vision for Audience Plus
is to become the operating system for owned media.
Starting with two use cases that today are currently in beta.
First is a new type of CMS that's purpose built for media.
With Audience Plus, you can easily launch a media property
on your domain that enables your audience
to subscribe directly to your videos,
your articles, your podcasts, and more.
And since it's all no code,
you can run your entire operation within the marketing team
without borrowing resources from engineering
to publish changes to the platform.
Today over 30 customers are in beta
and are the earliest pioneers in this movement.
The second use case that's launching this quarter
is our Audience Analytics,
a first party intent data platform
that allows you to both manage subscribers,
but also understand their engagement across your content.
We'll finally be able to break our dependence
on just web analytics tools alone
to really see the impact of our content
across the lifecycle.
And best of all, all of this data
is being captured in our proprietary audience graph database,
which over time will enable a rich understanding
of topics, formats, and creator collabs of interest.
By the way, you won't hear anything else
about the Audience Plus product from the stage today.
So if you have any interest in learning more,
we see Amanda, there she is.
Out in the foyer.
Honestly, I'm so excited about work building.
We'd love to share it with you
and have a chance to see a window to the future that we see.
All right, on the community front,
we believe that Golden Hour will continue
to play an important role in our movement,
starting here in Brooklyn today,
but a ton of ambition for where we can take this
kind of going forward.
So in addition to the annual conference,
which we hope to bring back every spring,
we host an executive forum every fall
that operates more like a facilitated,
peer-driven workshop for chief marketers.
Last year, we had 50 CMOs and over $100 billion
of market cap in the room.
And we're excited to bring what we're now calling
Golden Hour exec back this fall.
And I'm excited to announce one more community initiative.
Coming this fall, we're going to be launching
our first pilot chapter as of what we're calling
Golden Hour Local, a new initiative
of local community groups in your home city.
So think of this as a quarterly gathering
of content and demand marketers in your town
to compare notes on owned media strategy
and to work through some facilitated content.
Each local community will be chaired by a chapter president
and supported by the audience plus team
of content and logistics for these meetups.
So if you're interested in becoming a chapter president
and bringing Golden Hour Local to your city,
again, please stop by the booth with Amanda
and she'll share some more details on it.
All right, and so to talk about our content network,
I'm excited to bring up Todd Clouser to the stage,
audience plus his head of audience marketing.
Welcome Todd.
(audience cheering)
♪ Now, free, jump roughly ♪
♪ Now, free, jump roughly ♪
♪ Now, free, jump roughly ♪
My name is Todd Clouser.
Some of you may know me as the worst marker in the world.
But me standing on this stage right now is proof
that B2B content is changing because my background
is not in SAS.
In fact, my claim to fame is that I started
a two-person media company in the welding industry.
So how does that translate to B2B SAS?
Well, I'm here to tell you that.
And I'm also here to tell you about audience plus
his new content program and how that's going to affect
all of you in this room.
But before I do that, (laughs)
I wanna give a shout to both Anthony and JK.
They've done an amazing job at building V1
of our content program.
It's actually what drew me over to audience plus
in the first place because I believe in this mission so much.
That being said, over the past couple months,
we have spent a lot of time building out our strategic
narrative, aligning our content to goals,
and building the future of our own own media platform.
But I had to come up with something that kind of
summed up the goals of our content in a very simple
easy to understand way.
And because we're B2B marketers, this is what we came up with.
The goal of our content is to inspire the modern marketer
by curating owned media best practices with authentic
and editorial storytelling, advancing the adoption
of the strategy and sharing its impact on our profession.
Eh?
Eh?
(audience laughs)
I feel like a lot of you nodding right now.
I was nodding too.
(audience laughs)
But if you're anything like me,
there's a reason that you're nodding.
The reason is 'cause you looked over
and you saw Dave Gerhart doing it.
(audience laughs)
But the truth of the matter is,
you have no idea what I just said.
It's okay, Dave didn't either.
So here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna break this down.
(laughs)
We're gonna break this down.
So, Anthony just went over what owned media was, right?
And if you're in this room,
you probably believe that owned media
is the future of B2B marketing.
The problem with that though,
is not many people know how to do that, right?
There's no roadmap.
That is the goal of our content on Audience Plus.
We are going to go into excruciating detail
on how you can get started,
how you can measure and report on success,
and showcase other companies both inside
and outside of B2B,
so you can see where they are finding success.
So, it is my distinct pleasure
to be able to share with you
what we've been working on over the past couple months.
So, about two years ago,
Obed Durrani and I created Easy Mode.
Now, what Easy Mode is,
is it's an eight-part framework
that teaches content marketers and marketing teams
how to create a content engine using creators.
We've implemented this at dozens of companies now,
but today, you can go on Audience Plus
and get the full thing for free.
This is where I pause for the applause.
(audience applauds)
All right, so, quick question.
Has anybody noticed the obscene amount
of camera operators in the room today?
There is one camera operator for every 20 of you,
and there's a reason for that.
At Audience Plus, we believe that events
are a huge part of owned media,
and we wouldn't be doing our jobs
if we didn't chronicle this entire thing
and deliver it to you in an educational documentary
so you can do this exact same thing.
The series is called No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn,
and it is literally the blueprint
of how we put this event together.
And then finally, we have a new series coming soon
that is a guided playbook on how to build
an owned media strategy.
And because this is a very new approach
to be to be marketing,
I'm gonna walk you through a little bit
of what you will get.
You will get tutorials on how to integrate
owned media practices into whatever it is
that you're currently doing today.
You'll get exercises on how to test and measure
those different ideas.
You will get a companion guide with prompting questions
to complete with your team.
The goal is no more silos.
You can do this entire thing together,
and you will get additional resources
so you can go as deep down
that owned media rabbit hole as you want.
Now, this is the type of content
that you typically pay a consultant,
tens of thousands of dollars to do for you.
We are breaking this down so that you can do it
with your team on your own.
But in addition to these highly produced pieces of content,
we're also going to deliver daily content
through several show series using both internal
and external influencers.
You'll get a monthly broadcast
that we go into the best practices
that we're finding ourselves here at Audience Plus.
You'll get written how-to guides,
and you'll get access to our job board
where our goal is to help marketers find their next role
in companies that are actually running the new playbook.
But we also had to figure out how we get people to want
to subscribe to our content,
because the point of own media
is to build that deeper relationship with our audience.
So if you become a subscriber of Audience Plus,
you will get our newly reinvented newsletter
where we go into tactical how-tos
on how you can both implement the content strategy
and execute on it.
You'll get a monthly Q&A session,
it's kind of a town hall style
where you can come on and ask
and present the things that you're actually having problems with
so that we can help you fix those things and get unstuck.
You'll get access to the playbook,
which I just went over, including our first course
coming out later this year on to own media.
We will do quarterly research guides
that not only utilizes survey data,
but it utilizes actual data
that's coming out of the Audience Plus.
So if you're a network,
you'll get discounted access to all golden hour events
that Anthony just went over,
and you will get invitations to our new golden hour
community meetups that are coming soon
to a city near you.
So if any of this sounded interesting to you,
here's the QR code for you
to become a subscriber right now.
I'm literally measured on this number,
so I need to see more phones going up right now.
And I'm just going to sit here and chill for a little bit
until I sit here.
All right, all right, I'm leaving.
I promise I'm leaving. - Thank you, Todd.
I appreciate it.
Real quick, though, real quick.
Before I leave-- - Oh, Todd.
Before I leave, I just want to tempt you with something.
Just like real quick.
I've got a video for you, so...
Create to one.
Hey, guys. Welcome to Easy Mark.
Mark and hers are thinking about creating content
that's very different.
So we've built it up.
We wanted to create an on-site experience
that curated relationship building
for both Introvert and Introvert alike.
Trust-- Trust in the Oregon Easy.
Yes.
Because of hyper-compile mind or with bad friends,
we still keep on and specifically constantly.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We break both of those things down and then three parts.
More grace.
All right.
So if that doesn't exist, it's time for you to scan that part.
I don't know if I'm making it into the future in marketing
after all, so thank you all.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[CHEERING]
With your Todd's future in marketing is very bright.
So thank you, Todd.
We're so excited for-- to have you be a part of this.
Look, we're just so excited, again,
to get started, to formally kick things off here.
Many of you are staying with us at the William Vale.
And chances are, if you have--
and if you've taken the elevator down to the conference
floor, you might have seen this written on the wall,
alone, together, wish we planned it.
It was there when we arrived.
But I couldn't help but think just how appropriate
that framing is, considering, again, all that we've
been through over the last five years,
and what we're doing in response to that today.
Many of us have built our careers on a digital marketing
playbook that has served us very well,
but is anywhere from 18 to 25 years old
and is losing its impact.
We then experienced a whiplash sparked
by the pandemic in 2020 that left us exhausted
and looking for new ways to impact pipeline.
Today, nearly 25 years later, we're
gathering here to find our inspiration
for the new playbook for the marketing practice,
right here at Golden Hour.
So whatever you've been through, and whatever
you're going through now, you're not alone.
Events like this are little helpful reminders
that you are not alone in the challenges
that you may be facing at work.
At worst, we can be alone together.
So let's get started.
What do you think?
[APPLAUSE]