We saw the future of B2B marketing...here are the takeaways

Lessons that stuck with me after December's Gen Marketer Summit, from marketing leaders at OpenAI, Clay, Profound, and more. (Includes full event replay)

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Hopefully, you’ve heard: I hosted a 4-hour virtual Gen Marketer Summit with 500 of you and 11 speakers from companies including Profound, Primer, Framer, Unify, Tofu, Closing Media, Clay, Stripe, and OpenAI in December.

The focus of the event was how to uplevel for the AI era by becoming a Gen Marketer (a term I coined last year).

During the Summit, I felt like I got a glimpse into the future, watching speakers show off the latest AI products and talk about how they are upleveling their teams to handle the AI shift.

And after talking with every speaker, watching the live reactions, and reading hundreds of questions in the chat, I got even more clear on what actually matters heading into the new year. I personally became more confident that “Gen Marketer” isn’t simply a new job title, but a baseline skillset all marketers need.

Since then, a few ideas—let’s call them “mantras”—have been buzzing in my head. So, this newsletter isn’t going to recap the event in full (because you can watch it here, and paid subscribers can get the slides from my keynote here). Instead, I want to focus on what stood out after the event (and trust me, I did a lot of reflection on the event because afterwards I was stuck inside with a flu-like situation for 10 days!)

In this newsletter

Here are 3 marketing “mantras” for the new year that came directly from speakers. I think they’re great reminders, whether you came to the event or not:

1. Being a generalist doesn’t mean being mid at everything

2. With new GTM tools, there’s no excuse for Random Acts of Marketing

3. The new bar: “Learnings per minute” for your audience

This newsletter covers what we mean by each of these phrases, why it matters, and gives you clips and quotes to dive deeper into each.

Watch the event replay

Here are the recordings if you want to catch up on the full event, broken up into chapters so you can jump to what’s most interesting:

• Keynote with Emily Kramer (that’s me) - get my slide deck here

• AI workflows for Gen Marketers with Profound, Tofu, Framer, & Unify

• Scaling paid efficiently with Primer & Closing Media

• Roundtable with marketers from Stripe, Clay, & Pear VC (ex-Vanta)

• Fireside Chat with Dane Vahey, Head of B2B Marketing at OpenAI

• Q&A from the audience with me

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Thanks to our Gen Marketer Presenting Sponsors

Primer: Expand your paid efforts with Primer. Primer helps you build, enrich, and sync custom B2B audiences and deploy them across Meta, LinkedIn, Google, Reddit, and DV360 at 40–90% match rates.

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🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 for 20% off Profound Growth (new customers only)

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And thanks to all of our Summit sponsors: Framer, Unify, Tofu, Closing Media

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Join my new course: Gen Marketer Bootcamp starts January 27th!

If you loved the Summit and/or want an intensive of becoming a full-stack marketer for the AI era, I’m returning to teaching cohort-based-courses on Maven and my new course is open for applications.

If interested, check if your L&D budget covers courses. And Annual paid subscribers get a $100 discount (you’ll basically net $1 in this deal, since it’s only $99 for an annual subscription). Just comment that you’re an annual subscriber in your application, and if accepted, I’ll apply the discount.

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Now on to the mantras…

Being a generalist doesn’t mean being “mid” at everything.

What stood out at the Summit:

Being a Gen Marketer doesn’t just mean you are a generalist. It’s a specific set of skills marketers need to operate in the AI era.

Ting Ting nailed it:

“I’ve always believed that the world sort of belongs to generalists. Being able to understand other functions well, being able to hold different mental models in your head of how sales works or product works, that’s what makes generalists strong. [Being a generalist] is not an excuse to be bad at multiple things or be mid at multiple things.” –Ting Ting Luo, Head of Product Marketing at Clay Watch ➜

And this explanation seemed to land with the audience:

“You might be sitting there thinking, I’m a growth marketer, I’m a product marketer, I’m a content marketer, I’m a partner marketer—does this apply to me? Yes. Gen Marketer isn’t just another job title—it’s actually the new baseline skill set for marketers. So, whatever role you’re in, you need to uplevel your skill set to gain more generalist skills for the AI era.” –Kramer Watch ➜

Why it matters:

Since it’s easier to build products, create content, distribute across channels, and access data due to AI, the skills needed to succeed and get your product noticed have changed. Marketing teams have been a bit slow to keep up here, and it’s time to face the music: Your skillset and your team’s core competencies need to change.

The AI era isn’t rewarding marketers who know one narrow thing in isolation; it’s rewarding generalists who can connect the dots.

But being a generalist doesn’t mean giving up your edge or your craft. It means being excellent at one or two core marketing disciplines, and layering on enough cross-functional understanding to move work forward without constant handoffs. Handoffs only slow you down when velocity is the name of the game, and maybe more critically, they hurt creativity. Gen Marketers are well-suited to remove bottlenecks and give your team both the edge on velocity and quality.

You might recall I’ve also called this a π-shaped marketer. A π-shaped marketer has deep expertise in two areas (for example, product marketing and growth), with working knowledge across the rest of the function. A Gen Marketer takes this a step further by becoming proficient in executing campaigns and using AI to orchestrate.

So, you don’t need to change your title, and you still need to be excellent at executing in your key area, but you also need to expand how you operate. The marketers who will thrive are the ones who can retain a core competency, but also translate ideas into campaigns, campaigns into execution, and execution into results—without needing a small army to get there.

What to watch from the Summit:

• Hear from our roundtable of marketers who came up in 3 different disciplines (product marketing, growth marketing, and content & brand) to become Gen Marketing Leaders. Thanks, Zena, Ting Ting, and Jenny! Watch ➜

• Learn why Gen Marketer is the new baseline skillset in my keynote Watch ➜

• See Gen Marketers in action:

  • See how Nick at Profound prototypes AEO products based on his deep understanding of their audience Watch ➜

  • See how James at Framer creates an event landing page and connects the data to other tools Watch ➜

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Modern GTM tools leave no excuse for Random Acts of Marketing

What stood out at the Summit:

“Instead of just focusing on my one swim lane, I’m thinking about the whole swimming pool.” –Jenny Thai, Head of Marketing at Pear VC Watch ➜

With each new presenter at the Summit, we saw the future of GTM tools. These tools serve different functions and produce different outcomes, but they increasingly share the same core functionality: enrichment capabilities, workflows & agents, and AI prompting built directly into the product. Together, these tools leave no excuse for shipping generic content across disconnected channels that don’t align with your audience.

1. Enrichment: More of your GTM tools will enable you to pull in demographic, firmographic, and behavioral info about accounts and contacts—without manual research—to give you a full picture of your audience. That includes company size, industry, tech stack, funding, hiring signals, intent data, and increasingly, AI-derived insights from usage and behavior.

   What enrichment enables: When enrichment is built into your GTM stack, “we didn’t have enough context” stops being a valid excuse. Teams can define audiences, prioritize accounts, and personalize campaigns based on real signals—not guesses or static ICP slides.

2. Workflows & agents: Your GTM tools will enable you to define sequences of steps within a product or across products (i.e., lead fills out form from tier 1 account, add to CRM, alert Sales in Slack). AI-powered agents will take this a step further and decide how to progress work through various steps.
   
   Note: Some tools help you orchestrate workflows and build agents across many products (like Make, Relay, and Zapier), while other products (like Tofu, Unify, and Framer) are building workflows and agents directly into their platforms to connect their tools out to the rest of the GTM stack.

   What workflows and agents enable: Disconnected point solutions are becoming a thing of the past. Agents and workflows allow teams to run repeatable, end-to-end campaigns where signals trigger action, actions generate learning, and those learnings continuously improve execution. This is the infrastructure required to eliminate Random Acts of Marketing—and replace them with connected activities that compound.
   

3. AI prompting: More of your GTM tools will enable you to generate, adapt, and personalize content and creative directly inside the product—emails, ad creative, landing pages, call scripts, summaries. Instead of starting from a blank page or a generic template, you’ll be able to prompt to produce relevant “fuel” at scale, tailored to a specific audience, signal, or moment. As a side benefit, prompting within products will also help teams learn how to use the tool.

   What AI prompting enables: Prompting can remove creative bottlenecks, but only when paired with the right structure and inputs. As content creation gets built into tools that already have your proprietary data, brand guidelines, workflows, and analytics, you are more likely to produce work that resonates (and avoid generating slop). Add in a Gen Marketer with a high-quality bar and taste, and you can stand out!

Why it matters:

Now more than ever, Random Acts of Marketing™ just won’t do. When everyone can generate content and spin up channels quickly, throwing more spaghetti at the wall isn’t a strategy. You will simply not be able to keep up.

The good and bad news: It’s getting easier to run tightly coordinated campaigns with the new generation of GTM tools I just described, so:

• If you’re just doing random one-off activities, you’re toast (to put it bluntly).

• If you’re connecting activities, you’re only keeping pace.

• If you’re connecting workflows into repeatable campaigns, flywheels, or loops—and grounding them in real audience insights, leaning into clear Marketing Advantages™, and maintaining a high quality bar—you have a chance to win. (More on that in the next section.)

The other way to win: Most marketing teams are not set up today to meet the AI moment. With no “glue” connecting teams or owning campaigns end-to-end, impact doesn’t happen. By upskilling or empowering your team to act like Gen Marketers, who own connected workflows and campaigns, you can be a step ahead.

What to watch:

During the Gen Marketer Summit, several speakers walked through real workflows using modern GTM tools—showing what connected marketing activities look like in practice.

• In Tofu, Elaine shows how to re-engage closed-lost accounts by making repeatable, personalized, cross-channel campaigns based on account history and context (like why they churned) pulled in from other tools.
  Watch ➜

• In Unify, Austin shows how to trigger automated follow-up campaigns based on traffic source—specifically LLM-driven traffic—so high-intent, mid-funnel visitors don’t get lost and AEO work actually converts.
  Watch ➜

• With examples from Closing Media clients, Max shows us how to amplify top-performing organic LinkedIn posts into Linkedin Thought Leader Ads, extending the life of that content. I also wrote all about the “LinkedIn Flywheel” in this newsletter. Watch ➜

• With examples from Primer customers, Keith explains how to use paid channels to test messaging and audiences, then feed those learnings back into organic efforts, instead of running paid and organic in isolation. Watch ➜

• Bonus: To understand the AI skills you need, listen to Dane talk about the “AI primitives” he thinks all marketers should be learning. Watch ➜

You can watch all of these workflows and see the future of GTM tools here:

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Focus on “learnings per minute” for your audience.

What stood out at the Summit:

I’ve always had a pretty simple bar for marketing work: does this actually add value to the audience?

Truthfully, it’s a quality bar that has annoyed people I’ve worked with over the years—can’t we just ship it?! But this bar, and the rigor behind it, matters more now than ever, because it’s simply too easy to make crap. That’s why I loved when Dane brought this idea up during the Summit, using his own framing:

“I have this informal metric when I think about content, which is learnings per minute…And I don’t think enough marketers really optimize for learnings when they think about their content.” – Dane Vahey, Head of B2B Marketing at OpenAI Watch ➜

And I also loved how Ting Ting reinforced that you can have both speed and quality when you don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen:

“We are able to move fast because people can take things from end to end…the death of a marketing team is when every single idea takes 20 people to execute.” –Ting Ting Luo, Head of Product Marketing at Clay Watch ➜

Why it matters:

You need to become obsessed with putting out work that meets the “learnings per minute” or “adds value” bar.

I can bring on amazing presenters to show you powerful GTM tools and impressive workflows all day, but simply using these tools isn’t enough. The reality is, everyone will be using these tools sooner or later.

These tools help you do your job with increased velocity, but they aren’t a substitute for marketing fundamentals, strategic thinking, and human judgment. Here’s how to balance using AI to move with velocity and coming up with creative ideas that will drive outsize impact for your company:

• Start with a real understanding of your audience, product, and market

• Be clear on your unique Marketing Advantages and how you can actually win

• Plan for big bet campaigns and initiatives that play to those strengths

• Spend time developing high-quality, differentiated creative fuel ideas—humans are needed here!

• Develop creative with a specific engine (or engines) in mind—and get it to the right audience at the right time

• Use AI to help you orchestrate, move faster, and explore ideas

• But, don’t just take what AI gives you: Have a high-quality bar for your big bets. Sameness is invisible! Don’t be vanilla!

And that’s why this is such a great time to be a marketer. We have tools that enable us to execute on anything we can think up, faster than ever before. But creativity, taste, and judgment are still what separate good from great.

What to watch:

All of that can sound abstract: intentionality, judgment, having a bar. So, to ground this in reality, during the Summit, I walked through campaigns that are actually working right now.

These campaigns have the following in common: a clear creative idea, rooted in audience understanding, leveraging real Marketing Advantages, pairing fuel and engine that actually go together, and run by Gen Marketers who are able to move fast without sacrificing quality.

• Watch me explain what works now when it comes to standing out from the crowd. Hint: be human, focus on education, and leverage your “ecosystem”. Watch ➜

• I walked through 4 campaign examples during the Summit:

  • Granola Crunched Watch ➜
    (The only Spotify Wrapped–style clone that actually stood out this year. That said, this is not an endorsement for your company to run yet another Wrapped-style campaign; in fact, probably don’t!)

  • Lovable SheBuilds Watch ➜

  • Profound Index Watch ➜

  • Clay World Records Watch ➜

• Hear Dane from OpenAI’s answer to this question: “What was a big bet or a large campaign that you ran in 2025, why did you choose it, how did it work? Tell me everything.” Watch ➜

For paid MKT1 subscribers only: get the full slide deck from my keynote here.

Other takeaways and aha moments from the event:

I hope this newsletter has compelled you to watch (or even rewatch) sections of the Summit. I really do think we packed in the learnings per minute (but I’ll leave that to you to decide).

Here are some other moments you may want to check out:

• Nick from Profound on what drives AI brand visibility: “If you’ve heard about AEO research or content, you might know that FAQs are things that LLMs love. Why is that? LLMs are lazy. They want to be served up an answer without spending a lot of compute power figuring this stuff out.” Watch ➜

• Keith from Primer on paid in 2026: “If inventory is constrained, and competition is rising, what is paid for in 2026? I think the new moat is not how much you spend, it’s how quickly you learn. Execution is easy now. AI killed execution, scarcity, everyone can launch fast, everyone can test fast. Everyone can spin up creative fast. The winner is not the biggest spender. It’s the fastest learner in this context. So you just have to optimize faster.” Watch ➜

• Zena Davé from Bridge on career trajectory in the AI era: “I don’t feel the need to build a kingdom of people…just because I don’t have a ton of people around me or under me doesn’t mean [this new role] was a step back by any means.” Watch ➜

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🙏 Thanks again to our Gen Marketer Summit sponsors, all of whom have discounts for the MKT1 community!

Profound: Get your brand mentioned by LLMs, track visibility & improve AEO
🎁 Offer: 20% off Profound Growth Plan with code MKT1

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Closing Media: Boutique agency partner for LinkedIn ads and paid media campaigns
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 for $5,000 of free ad spend for your next campaign

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More from MKT1

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