Audrey Dotson

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that if Product Marketers still have to spend a large amount of time explaining what we do and the value we bring, that’s on us...not the org. Before PMM, I worked in strategy. My title was “Senior Strategy Manager.” Nobody knew what the hell that meant. I assumed it was my fault. I couldn’t explain who found me valuable or why. Now, in PMM, I see the same pattern. Our role looks different everywhere (like strategy roles). We anchor on outputs like slides, one-pagers, launches, positioning...but rarely our impact. That’s why people still ask what we do. The truth is: Product Marketing exists to connect product, market, and revenue. We bring together what we build, how we sell it, and whether customers actually see value once they buy. With Product, we try to make sure what’s built aligns with what buyers want. With Sales, we make it easier to win with sharper stories, stronger positioning, cleaner objection handling. With Demand Gen, we help campaigns convert with better targeting, messaging, channels and content. Done well, PMM is a revenue driver. Done poorly, it’s a deck factory. And that’s the part we control. We should assume that our work shows in numbers, or it doesn’t matter. Until we anchor our value in the same metrics the CEO and CFO care about, pipeline, win rate, retention lift, etc we’ll keep explaining instead of leading. I think we need to stop defending the role and start focusing on moving metrics. #PMM

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CMOs 🤝 CTOs While us vendors often blame other vendors for creating a mess within organizations and bloating a tech stack, the reality is that leadership misalignment is usually the reason it gets out of hand. When marketing and I.T. leaders pull in different directions, teams inadvertently double down on inefficient processes and increased data duplication. IT demands control; marketing demands agility. The result? Both lose. 👎 New on the MessageGears blog: a 90-day alignment plan for CMOs and CTOs to co-own their tech stack. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/eWV9juRA

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I've spoken with 15+ demand gen marketers in the last two weeks and I'm scared. As a former 'insider' I know what they don't. Everyone is basing their paid media spend on accounts their legacy intent providers tell them are in a certain buying stage. At some point in the last 10 years it became the norm to rely on 3rd party intent to unequivocally determine buying stage. This is scary. It's scary because all this data is built on a lie. Here's what I mean... Back in the 2010s I used to run paid ads for mobile app offers. Mobile was new and advertisers wanted to monetize. Some of the first advertisers were OEM car brands wanting to drive installs of their newly minted mobile apps. Here's what happened: The "auto intender" audience started with Autotrader visitors. Real car shoppers. People browsing inventory, comparing prices, scheduling test drives. Toyota would pay $50 CPM all day because these people were ACTUALLY buying cars. Conversion rates were ridiculous. Only 7-9 million people in the US are in-market for a car at any given time. Autotrader had access to maybe 500K of them. Then the agencies got involved. Toyota's competitor was running campaigns reaching 20 million people. Toyota needed scale. So the data companies expanded the definition of "auto intender." Started with Autotrader visitors (real buyers). Then added: → Car insurance comparison sites (maybe buying, maybe just shopping insurance) → Tire retailer websites (could be buying, could just need tires) → Auto news blogs (probably just reading) → "How to change your oil" tutorials (definitely not buying) Within 18 months, "auto intenders" ballooned from 7 million to 50 million profiles. The math stopped making sense. But nobody questioned it. Fast forward to today. The EXACT same thing is happening with B2B intent data. What 3rd party intent claims: "This account is researching marketing automation" What it actually means: Someone read a blog post that mentioned email marketing. What they claim: "High intent to purchase CRM" What it means: Someone visited a SaaS review site. Any review site. For any product. What they claim: "Actively evaluating sales tools" What it means: Someone downloaded a generic eBook about sales productivity. When these platforms needed to justify $100K+ contracts, they watered down the definition to hit the volume their pricing required. This is why: → You're paying premium CPMs for audiences that aren't in-market → Your ABM platform reports "influenced pipeline" not created pipeline → Sales ignores 95% of intent alerts (false positives) → You can't prove ROI SMBs and small mid-market company marketers are waking up to this already. 2026 will be a major reckoning year for legacy intent providers as marketers at larger companies wake up, rebuke the lie and take their dollars elsewhere.

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The Specialist is Dead. Long Live the Polymath. For the past decade, conventional wisdom in marketing hiring was clear: go deep, not wide. The demand gen person. The SEO lead. The content strategist. Brilliant in their vertical, optimized for their function. That model is breaking. Not because specialization no longer matters — it does. But because AI can now execute many tasks that used to define a specialist's value: drafting content, running A/B tests, analyzing campaign data, optimizing spend in real time. When a machine can do in seconds what once took days, the specialist's edge evaporates — unless that person has something AI doesn't. What AI doesn't have, inherently, is judgment across domains. Enter the polymath. Tomorrow's highest-value marketer isn't the one with the deepest vertical expertise — it's the one who can think holistically across creative, analytical, and technical dimensions simultaneously. Write a brief, read a dashboard, understand why an API integration matters, and translate all of it into a prompt that gets great output from AI. Think of it as an evolution of the T-shaped marketer. What AI does is flatten the vertical. Deep skills that once differentiated specialists are increasingly table stakes. The horizontal bar — curiosity, adaptability, cross-domain fluency — becomes the actual differentiator. The four qualities Traction (see link below) identifies for the marketer of the future resonate with me: curious, adaptable, correspondent, and polymath — able to draw connections across creative, analytical, and technical domains that siloed thinkers would miss entirely. I've worked alongside people like this. They ask "why does this work?" rather than "what should I do next?" They thrived in wide-scope, high-ambiguity roles when the org chart never quite fit them. Turns out, they were just ahead of the curve. If you're rebuilding a marketing org this year, ask this about every role: Is this a job that requires a human to think across domains — or is it execution work AI can increasingly absorb? The polymath era has arrived. The org chart just hasn't caught up yet. Inspired by Traction's framework for the marketing org of the future. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eJ2J-42Q #AI #MarketingOS #TalentManagement

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Influencer campaigns can be a great channel for brand storytelling, but don’t get caught in the reach and hype trap.   Joelle Moroney joined me and Laura Smith for a new episode of Prose + Comms: Engagement, Unplugged to discuss just that.    We look at what the best brands get right when working with influencers, some fails to avoid, and creative ways to use influencers to amplify your brand story. 🔗Listen here https://lnkd.in/e4D-2SmN and other platforms today:                    🍎 Apple: https://lnkd.in/e8c9A3HU 🟩 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ez9SM3Xr 🎵 Amazon: https://lnkd.in/ey7wgn7P

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AI might be ghosting your brand. Not because your content is bad, but because AI prioritizes structure, context & trust. Search is becoming answers. Owned content, especially video, is becoming infrastructure. Volume is out. Clarity is in. Here's what’s changing, why it matters, and how to stay visible before you vanish from the conversation 👇👇👇

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