Stop calling yourself a thought leader
You keep using that phrase! I do not think it means what you think it means.
Your content calendar is full. Your blog posts are polished. So why aren't the leads pouring in?
The brutal truth: Most B2B brands get thought leadership wrong — regurgitating conventional wisdom and corporate cliches. True thought leadership is bold. It introduces new data, perspectives, and analysis into the market that cuts against the grain. If it’s not new, you’re not leading. You’re just another follower.
In our new podcast series, Global Marketing Leaders, we’re getting real about what works in marketing in 2025. The game has changed, and if you’re running back the Demand Waterfall playbook like it’s 2015, you’re going to struggle. Our first episode features a content leader who’s stayed on the cutting edge. Chris Anderson has led bold strategies at CNN, LinkedIn, and HSBC, and he doesn’t hold back when dishing what marketers need to do differently in 2025.
Watch our interview with Chris above to learn:
Why you need to ditch the broadcast model and treat content like a community effort. We’re in a new age, and you need to bring your audience along with you.
The hidden ROI of executive content. It’s not all about leads; it’s also about playing the internal game, boosting the visibility and influence of your content program inside the company.
How to avoid sanitizing your content. There’s nothing worse than 20 people in a Google doc, watering down a piece until it says almost nothing. After F500 stints in heavily regulated industries, Chris shares his playbook for keeping too many cooks out of the kitchen — and ensuring your voice and perspective is strong.
Want more insights from the world’s top marketing leaders? Subscribe on YouTube to catch every episode.
The AI Hype Matrix maps the latest AI news stories across an unimpeachable scale of Hype (everyone is talking about this!) and Fear (will this kill my career? Will this kill EVERYONE?). Here’s a rundown of the latest big news in AI.
Anthropic and OpenAI are locked in an expensive game of one-upmanship with their latest model releases. While Claude 3.7 Sonnet gets high marks as a "hybrid reasoning model" with impressive coding chops, GPT-4.5 is getting a relatively lukewarm reception so far — and with skyrocketing costs to run the model, there are serious questions about OpenAI’s long-term viability. Perhaps to make up for it, OpenAI is now giving Plus users limited access to its promising Deep Research tool — previously only available at the $200/month Pro level.
In other AI product releases, Amazon's $20/month Alexa Plus is maybe, perhaps, finally here this time to make your smart speaker actually, you know, smart. Microsoft’s also on a roll, redesigning Copilot and announcing a host of new Windows AI features while casually dropping a major breakthrough in quantum computing. Meanwhile, the internet’s most politically incorrect model, xAI’s Grok 3, has rocketed to the top of leaderboards after training on "Colossus," a supercluster with supposedly 10 times the compute of previous models — though, to Musk’s chagrin, that hasn’t stopped it from cheerfully drafting assassination plans for its creator.
And in a move that would have been front-page news two years ago but is now just another Tuesday, The New York Times is officially embracing AI with internal tools that could eventually write social copy, SEO headlines, and even analyze the paper's own content. Next up: AI-generated correction notices that need their own correction notices.
AI budgets are booming
Data from tech talent platform A.Team finds that business leaders are eyeing that sweet, sweet ROI with their latest GenAI investments. A whopping 96% of senior technical decision-makers plan to increase AI spending this year, with over half expecting to boost budgets by 50% or more. The industry's confidence is particularly striking given the complete absence of planned decreases or pauses — not a single respondent indicated they plan to pump the brakes in the foreseeable future.
One long video, multiple viral shorts, zero all-nighters
Content creators drowning in 45-minute webinar recordings have a potential lifeline in OpusClip, an AI tool that automatically transforms lengthy content into bite-sized social clips — complete with captions, proper aspect ratios, and even contextual B-roll. While the usual AI-content caveats apply (always review before posting), we can report first-hand that Opus is one hell of a useful tool. In addition to helping you identify each clip’s “hook,” the tool also assigns a virality score (an algorithmic prediction of engagement potential) and allows for one-click publishing to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Great insights on this! The thought leadership model is quite saturated. It's good to step back and think, what thoughts am I ACTUALLY leading 🤔 definitely food for thought for me.