The Campaign | A Marketing Podcast by 97th Floor

Wikipedia became one of the most visited websites on earth without ads, VC money, or a top-down editorial team. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, joins the show to share what actually built that, and why the lessons apply far beyond a nonprofit encyclopedia.

Key takeaways:

• The accidental innovation advantage: Th...

Personas have earned a bad reputation in B2B marketing—and for good reason. Most sit unused on hard drives, filled with irrelevant demographic data like "married with two kids, drives a Volvo." Ardath Albee, author of Digital Relevance and a pioneer in buyer persona development since 2000, explains why most personas fail and what actually makes them work.

Key takeaways for marketing lead...

When Whitney joined Gorilla Logic a year ago, she inherited a team facing the same pressure every marketing organization feels right now: prove you're using AI or fall behind. But instead of chasing efficiency metrics, Whitney asked a harder question: "If we can't definitively say why it's making progress and showing up better and making incremental change that helps the bottom line, why...

Organic traffic is down. Click-through rates are dropping. And every marketer is panicking about whether their SEO strategy is dead. Mike Witham and Blake Nielson from 97th Floor's AI Task Force are here to set the record straight: 80% of what worked in SEO still works for AI search—but that 20% difference is critical.

In this tactical breakdown, Mike and Blake share what they're seeing ...

What does it take to build groundbreaking companies across three decades of tech evolution? Daniel Nissan, founder of Structured (formerly Structured Web), made the first internet phone call in 1993, launched the first nationwide grocery delivery service before Amazon, and is now rebuilding his 26-year-old platform from for the AI era.

In this episode, Daniel shares hard-won lessons from...

Most B2B marketers are stuck playing it safe, following "best practices" that guarantee mediocre results. Udi Ledergor, former CMO of Gong and author of Courageous Marketing, has spent his career doing the opposite—running Super Bowl ads for 5% of the expected cost, getting Times Square billboards for $500, and building a marketing machine that made Gong impossible to ignore.

In this con...

Most early-stage startups fail at the same place: they can't figure out marketing. Sterling Snow, former CMO at Divvy (acquired for $2.5B), has cracked the code on what actually works when you're searching for your first scalable channel—and it's not what the playbooks tell you.

Sterling calls it "the haystack phase"—that brutal early period where you're testing everything, burning throu...

The Apple-Gemini announcement changed everything—but not in the way most people think. Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO, explains why this partnership doesn't signal the death of SEO but rather Google's complete dominance over search for the foreseeable future.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Eli challenges nearly every assumption marketers hold about SEO in 2026. From why your...

With AI making it easier than ever to launch startups, B2B SaaS companies are facing an unprecedented wave of competition. Bill Macaitis, former CMO of Slack and Zendesk, shares exactly what marketers need to do in 2026 to not just survive—but dominate.

Bill brings decades of experience taking companies from startup to IPO, and his perspective on what's coming is both sobering and energi...

While everyone's talking about AI, very few are actually making it work. Marie Haynes, renowned SEO expert and AI experimentalist, is one of the rare practitioners who's gone beyond the hype—building 50+ custom AI tools (gems), testing workflows daily, and learning what actually ships versus what crashes and burns.

In this candid conversation, Marie shares the unglamorous reality of AI i...

A staggering 41% of marketers admit they don't do audience research nearly enough, and over half do it very infrequently. In this conversation, SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin breaks down why audience research has become marketing's orphaned responsibility and what it's costing companies in missed opportunities.

From ...

Matt Frisbee went from Disney performer to marketing executive, and is one of the best storytellers around. In this conversation, Matt breaks down the art of storytelling in marketing, shares how he built breakthrough campaigns at Little Giant Ladder Systems, and explains why "feeling understood is the sexiest feeling in the universe."

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