What Companies Get Wrong About B2B Content Syndication.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:00 - 00:21
It's 11AM in the Bay Area, 2 PM in New York City. And wherever you are, it's time for a Coffee Break. I'm Alex Jonathan Brown, senior content strategist at Iron Horse. That intro was so good, it made Josh laugh.

Josh Baez
00:21 - 00:25
Sorry. You took me by surprise. That was a really good intro. I really liked it.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:25 - 01:14
Very professional. Unless you've been living under a literal rock for the last few years, you've probably heard a little bit about content syndication.
The pitch for content syndication is straightforward. You take your really good content. You get it in front of your target audience who are actively looking for the thing that you're selling. And just it's angels singing. It's the most amazing thing that's ever happened.
But if you do it inefficiently, you might not be seeing the results that you were expecting. So to talk about the current state of content syndication and how good I am at hosting webinars, I'm joined today by Josh Baez, senior manager of Demand Gen at NetLine, and Iron Horse's very own founder and CEO, Uzair Dada. Hi, everybody.

Uzair Dada
01:14 - 01:17
Hello. Hello.

Alex Jonathan Brown
01:17 - 01:58
So we set the tone early for what I hope will be a fun conversation. But, Josh, the reason why we brought you on is, I mean, just general content syndication knowledge, etcetera. But NetLine recently put out the 2025 State of B2B Content Report, always required reading around the Iron Horse offices. But what are you seeing? Like, what are some of the highlights coming out of that report? What are the things about, specifically, maybe, content consumption data, that kinda let us know what buyers are looking for at this, in 2025.

Josh Baez
01:58 - 03:59
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Alex and Uzair. It's always nice chatting with you too. So for those who don't know me, my name is Josh Baez. Like Alex said, I'm the senior manager of Demand Gen here at NetLine. We are a programmatic lead gen content syndication solution.
So our goal is to connect marketers like you with content just like this, and hopefully you love it. Essentially, ensuring that your brand gets in front of the buyers who are in market and researching and, you know, want to learn more about you. So, at NetLine, we believe that your buyers are everywhere and so you need to be too.
So, to get back to your question, Alex, what we found and I'm checking my notes because I don't know these numbers off the top of my head. But, our report from this year showed us 7,900,000 first party leads, which was a 27% year over year increase, since last year and also the largest volume of registration data ever recorded by NetLine.
So that's massive. Right? It means that clearly, buyers are engaging with content. Well, there's 7,900,000 of them that we saw just in the year alone. But on the flip side, we're also experiencing what we are calling the consumption gap.
What this is is it's essentially the point of time when a buyer first registers for content and when they actually open it. And we found that that consumption gap has widened by around 7.3 hours. So it's now increased from around thirty one hours to thirty eight to thirty nine hours.
So that's a long time. So we know that our buyers are clearly interested. They're engaging with more content than ever before, but they're also taking much, much longer to actually consume the content that they're registering for. So, you know, we're here to talk about, like, why that is, what to do about it, all that good stuff.

Uzair Dada
04:01 - 04:36
Yes. It's. fascinating to me. And one of the reasons, sort of, for a lot of our conversation today. It's cool because it's the first time I've actually heard the quantified number from a submit to consume, and that's average over a huge group of people. So that there could be a huge variation. You know, it'd be cool to see sort of if there were cohorts of ranges across that, but, like, that is a really interesting data point.

Josh Baez
04:36 - 05:03
Yeah. It's really interesting, and it's also I feel like you hear that as a B2B marketer, today, and, like, it's a little bit scary.
Right? You think, oh God. Like, buying journeys are already insanely long. Like, there's so many hoops that you have to jump through. And now on top of that, like, it takes around, like, thirty six to forty eight hours for someone to even read anything that you send them. So, like, what do you do about it? You know?

Uzair Dada
05:03 - 05:20
So I know I know we're gonna go into this. Alex, I'll let you drive. But to me, the whole notion of, you know, recall, which is one of our favorite topics when it comes to content syndication. This actually illuminates a lot of insight into that that metric, actually. 

Alex Jonathan Brown
05:20 - 06:02
Yeah. And I think that's as good a next little conversation to have as anything. But recall, obviously, incredibly important, more so when you're looking at somebody who's maybe encountering your company really for the first time. Like, they found this landing page there or they saw the piece of content. They're excited to get it.
But they don't have any connection to your branding yet. So getting them to, like getting your company to stay in their head becomes incredibly important. And what are some of the things that, like, you can do to help increase that recall? And I mean, honestly, based on those numbers you just gave, Josh, how do we make sure that they open the things they downloaded?

Josh Baez
06:02 - 07:16
Yeah. Yeah. It's an ongoing conversation. Right? Because I think that there are so many ways that marketers can implement to improve recall. You know, there's things like nurture emails, there's things like display ads, there's things like social. Like, it's all the typical marketing orchestration and campaign planning.
Like, none of that I think is surprising. I think what is surprising is just the amount that you actually have to invest in recall and not just the point of registration. Thinking that that is where that shift in thinking and planning needs to really happen, where it's not just about, you know, making sure that the qualified lead is qualified for sales. It's about how do you make sure that this buyer who is qualified, like, on paper, like, they meet the ICP. How do you ensure that, you know, they're sticking with you and recalling you at the time when they actually are ready to buy? I think we know that, like, 95% of your market or of your audience is not in market. So how do you ensure that, like, you don't fall out of the conversation?

Uzair Dada
07:16 - 10:06
Yeah. Josh is being a smart growth marketer talking about all cool things and how they should be. Let me let me come and be a dumb, a dumb is a wrong term. Let me talk about an everyday average marketer who has enormous pressure in the environment they live in to generate the four letter word we call lead.
That infamous lead that we all live and die by every day, every moment of the day. And we have hungry salespeople that are looking for that amazing moment that someone downloaded this amazing asset, and they can call them and say, hello, are you ready to buy? And then that person doesn't answer the call. Or if they answer the call, they go, who are you? And why are you calling me? And I have no clue what are you talking about that I downloaded the asset.
That happens every day, all day, every second of the day for every enterprise marketer who's doing content syndication. And we know why it's happening. It's a, we have the propensity of over-indexing on what we expect from this action. This action is a action.
It's not a it's not a metric of intent. It's a implied metric of interest very early in this stage. Right? And yet we keep assuming that the person came in and that they are ready for the next major step of engaging with you as a salesperson. And the way we justify it is when we give them this really high value asset. It was a buying guide for something. It was a blah blah blah for something. Right? It's awesome. But we don't understand is they are just doing stuff.
And what Josh just said earlier on that forty hour to forty eight hour metric or sixty hour metric, if you think about I've had so many con customers of ours, even after we've coached them, they have the desire to take that and go straight into Salesforce to the SDR team to market. Right? And if they are, if they are really smart growth teams and they have awesome SLAs to go follow-up with those people, and they're calling them in that thirty eight to sixty hour window, they don't recall anything.
They pressed a button somewhere somehow. Right? It totally makes sense. But yet us as marketers keep doing Groundhog Day again and again and again and again. So I think we need to dissect and be real about this, guys. Like, as a community, we need to have this open conversation about understand the reality. And I think this nugget to me, I'd if, you know, this was an awesome nugget. I'm gonna use that. I didn't realize that number. But that, I think, makes a lot of sense now, and it should minimally say you should have five to six days of warming. If nothing else, that's too short. But if you are not doing that and sending it over for action, there's no chance, zero. You won't get anything out of it. So I think that's I think we should unlock that more. But, yeah, this is fascinating.

Alex Jonathan Brown
10:53 - 11:54
And I think that's a good transition point to talk to maybe back the camera out a little bit. I know we're talking specifically about recall, but what are some of the other ways that we see content syndication plays? Like, is there you just talked about, oh, we're throwing it right to right to sales immediately. Go figure it out. They downloaded the thing.
But the, like, whiteboard version of content syndication makes so much sense. And yet, I think a lot of people do find ways to basically, frankly, screw it up. So what are some of the, I'm so, the energy is great today. So what are some of those things that we kinda see often out in the real world that are, like, stumbling blocks mainly because I mean, I don't know. But I think largely it's because it does feel so straightforward that we get excited about that and not maybe so willing to, like, do the work to really make it shine, or have the patience to really let it work.

Uzair Dada
11:54 - 12:30
Yeah. I mean, we all know that the sales cycles and the buying cycles are long. Along those buying cycles, you know that people consume content on the edges and not just on your domain. And so the notion of go where your customer is and go where your prospect is has been there.
What is one of the cool things why we like at Iron Horse, like working with the NetLine folks a lot, is they're one of the very, very few, like, almost a single hand few, people who actually syndicate across technology and other functional publishers. Content. So when you go to a Wall Street Journal, you're gonna go to a Forbes, or you're gonna go to a Fortune, and you download a piece of content, it's these guys serving it up.
So if I'm trying to get to a CFO or VP of finance or whoever I'm trying to get to, they are in the right watering hole. So they're they the context of them downloading something in that watering hole has a higher value and context than someone, I'd say the other dirty truth about content syndication is over 90% of content syndication vendors are database owners who send who have thousands of domains that they have they use to send emails out to you that you have no clue about, and then probably leads to a lot of oops clicks.
And even if I downloaded something, you know, I don't I don't remember doing that. So I think just the fact that I'm reaching the person in the right watering hole with something that may be of interest. Me, as an example, as a leader, I probably consume eight to ten ten pieces of content. Wrong wrong term. I download eight to 10 pieces of content a day. I don't remember in the top of my mind what they are, but they're sitting in my download inbox on my Mac.
But once thing is triggered, I remember I did something that may be there that I can go look it up. And that may happen in a forty hour minute. It actually happens sometimes in two months later. I remember something that I downloaded something, and I'll go look it up.
Right? So that is really cool if you understand it, that as long as I'm getting the information to who I need to get to, ideally in a watering hole that's important to them so there's a higher degree of context, and trying to just stay top of inbox. I think that, to me, is a is a very important one.
Second, and probably be cool to hear Josh's take on this, the one of the biggest reasons our customers use content syndication is to build a email marketable database. I don't have the right buying team personas in my database. I don't have target account contacts in my database that I can talk to. So how do I build that structure? So it's usually the start of the journey of doing that.
That doesn't mean you only use it at the start of the journey, but that's usually where it starts. And then if you are a smart marketer, you can say, as I'm going through my journey and I have a defined conversation arc, mister Alex Brown, you know, then I can start giving you different bits of information throughout.
Just like I nurture you through email and I nurture you through programmatic display ads, I can actually nurture you through what Josh is calling programmatic content syndication or programmatic lead gen as well now.
So it's becoming really awesome. And especially with these guys where they're starting to now integrate with Demandbase and others to be able to bring that dataset together, the ability for us as marketers to do that sophisticated, content indication led or contest syndication integrated nurture pathing is becoming cooler and cooler.

Josh Baez
15:49 - 18:12
Yeah. Just like so many things that I wanna touch on, Uzair. I guess the first thing that I think of is that I think that the promise of content syndication that was sold years ago is no longer the promise that it is today. And I think that we as a marketing community need to come to terms with the fact that there is no like, nothing is simple anymore.
Right? Like, in you know, even ten years ago, maybe this was a bit simpler where someone registers for something. They know exact like, they read it immediately. You follow-up, and it's like done deal. But, like, that's not that's not reality. And I think that syndication has now become one step in a much larger journey, kind of like what you said. I also think that, you know, it's an unfair assumption these days where, you know, lead gen has gotten such a bad rap over the years from vendors, you know, saying, you know, leads are dead. Like, who cares about MQLs? And I think that that has put, you know, a negative light and almost like a weighted, like, a weight that that that content indication in lead gen now have to deal with. Because, you know, you have other technologies, things like account- based marketing.
You have, like, social, like, paid ads where you're paying for traffic. Like, you're paying for impressions, but no one ever, you know, says to you, oh, this didn't, convert immediately, or people that we now reach out to from ABM don't remember who we are. Right? Like, you don't have those same conversations. And so I think that similarly with lead gen, like, you need to think about it holistically.
Like, what are you investing in today for the next, you know, three to six to twelve months down the road, because this is not going to be like the, you know, the stop gap between, you know, an empty pop an empty pipeline and a full pipeline in a matter of, like, days. Like, this is an investment like any other marketing tech, and I think that, you know, we owe it to ourselves and ultimately to our buyers and to everyone that we are engaging with. Like, we owe it to them that we step up how we treat them when they engage through this kind of channel.

Alex Jonathan Brown
18:12 - 18:55
So we talked a lot about how essentially, how we shouldn't treat content syndication leads. Like, there's, you know, there's all of the the kind of the stumbling blocks, the don'ts. But I wonder if we could drill down a little more on what kind of the ideal way to handle those leads is.
We’ve talked that we need to do more with them, etcetera. But, like, if we could just brainstorm real quick just, like, what is that what does an ideal flow kind of look like? Uzair, you said this is occasionally gonna be, like, the way somebody finds you. Right? It's their first touch. So then what do we do after that?

Uzair Dada
18:55 - 20:05
Yeah. I mean I mean, it's it's sort of like you know, it's the back to the the reference I made to a conversation arc is, hopefully, we've, at least in some way, defined what conversation we wanna have with the different people we're perceivably gonna get in front of. Go have that conversation, and go have that conversation across the different touch points. So it's a, hello, nice to meet you. Let me share some information about this. Oh, you find this interesting. Oh, you have this question. Let me give you this more information. Oh, this is great. You'd like to see it. Let me show it to you. Oh, you wanna see more stuff and see if this actually works? Let me share some case studies with you. And we sort of go through, and we have this journey in our head that we go through and do.
We don't just always implement it. So it's not crazy hard. It's just we take shortcuts. And so really, the answer is shortcuts don't work when you're doing if you're assuming content syndication is gonna lead you somewhere. I was talking to a customer the other day, and they said, oh, our content syndication is amazing. We only target companies that are in the, you know, decision and consideration stage.

Josh Baez
20:05 - 20:11
Oh, that's cool that that's, like, very linear and, like, being cut for them. That's really nice.

Uzair Dada
20:11 - 20:15
They just were able to jump in step three and go to step one.

Josh Baez
20:15 - 20:20
Yeah. You know. Once you're in there, you can't get out. So you can only go forward.

Uzair Dada
20:20 - 20:53
It's just, you know, like it's if you just kinda simplify you've heard me say this on a lot of Coffee Breaks that we've had. Let's just simplify, guys. It's just a conversation. Literally, that's all it is.
Have it respectfully in different places. Make sure you ensure that you're moving the conversation forward. If you gave them something that was awareness, give them something else. You know? Don't have conversations like, I already have this person in my database. So, Josh, don't send me another lead from this person. Like, no. If they're consuming additional pieces of content Right. Multiple times, that's a good thing. Like, you want that to happen. Right?

Josh Baez
20:53 - 20:57
You don't wanna dedupe them just because they're already there. Right? Like, that's not how.
Uzair Dada
20:57 - 21:10
Exactly. And but I think the other part also is make sure to avoid catch and release because what happens is a lead comes in and then it just sits and collects stuff. And so make sure you have a mechanism to retarget them, reach them again, send them something that's better, and be respectful. Right? Be respectful. A first touch is a first touch. It's not a let's go on a date touch. Right? It's a first touch. It's a let's get to know each other.
Let's learn more. Right? And so it's when we take those shortcuts, the conversation breaks. Yeah. And and and and it's not a where you start. It's just having the conversation. And I think journey stages have become a little obsessive to market models. Right? It's a perceive, it's a perception of our head of where they are because of what we believe is the journey stage.
Right? But, really, are you having the right conversation? And if they're not engaging in that conversation, that's great. You're still giving them the option to have that conversation. So I'd say, to me, have the conversation is the message.

Josh Baez
22:17 - 24:40
Yeah. I think I mean, that's absolutely right. When it comes to the more, like a more tactical approach when it comes to, like, following up on content syndication leads or leads that you've generated through, a solution like a NetLine. I think that it really relies on your ability to ask questions not only for yourself, but also, like, ask questions to the lead if someone were to reach out.
Right? Thinking about, like I mean, going back to, like, old school marketing like BANT. Like, what is their need? Like, why did they engage with something like this? Does this, like, asking them questions to uncover that, I think, is really critical. 
Simultaneously, something that we really like to advise our clients on is when you have someone reaching out to a lead that's been any kind of lead, actually, any lead that's registered for content. Instead of simply saying something like, oh, hey. I saw you downloaded our report. I would love to schedule a demo.
Like, no one wants that. Like, you need to stop doing that right now if you're doing that because you're tanking your email performance. But instead of that, maybe something that's a little bit more, like, advisory, a little bit more, like, helpful, something similar to, hey, I saw you just downloaded our report. Based on what I know about you, you are a demand gen marketer at an enterprise company who just had xyz program planning or funding happen. I think that you would really appreciate chapter three, specifically where we talk about, you know, a specific topic.
And I think that you should take a look at that. I'll give you a few days, and I'll check back in when you have it when you've had a chance to see if you have any more questions. I think that, you know, a little turn like that where it shows that, like, you don't wanna do a hard sell, but you do wanna make sure that you're there for them, like, that context is everything. But simultaneously, like, when you are generating leads through content syndication or through any channel, having the right context of the lead's journey in its entirety, is also really important because, otherwise, like, your sales team will have no idea how to follow-up with them. Like, they just know that they downloaded something, but you need to be able to, you know, build out who that person is, before you do the outreach.

Uzair Dada
24:40 - 24:44
I think that was a, you touched on that your sales team touch. It's not just the email touch, but giving them the context of how to have that conversation is something we completely skip as marketers. And as a result, they assume it's much more evolved than it is.
So it's part of that the sales to marketing bridge that, Alex Jonathan Brown, we talk about a lot and we, you know, emphasize a lot is still very opaque. And so we do this this a lot as marketers over the fence to the sales folks, and we don't do a good job giving the baton, ensuring the baton doesn't drop, ensuring giving them the context to have that conversation because of where the person is in that journey so that they can be respectful of that. So I think there is a gap on both sides. It's not just that they are doing it. It's also we're not coaching them Right? How to use this asset and other things because oftentimes, people above have such immense targets and goals that they have to meet on a quarterly basis of number of leads that were promised to someone that you just are hamster in the wheel just doing it rather than doing it the right way.

Josh Baez
25:56 - 27:07
Yeah. Yeah. And one last thing too to add to that. One of the really cool things that I think a lot of our most successful clients at Netline do is they will actually embed custom questions directly into the form, the registration form that, all of our clients use through our platform, where they actually ask, like, things around, what is your timeline to to purchase? Are you thinking about purchasing, or investing in a specific solution related to, the company? And I think that if you can add additional questions baked directly into that registration form, like, you get like, the entire universe kind of opens up to you, and you like, understanding that baton pass, that becomes so much easier because that that information can just go in real time to your CRM so that when a salesperson is ready to reach out, they have everything that they need right at their fingertips.
That doesn't mean that, like, your job as a marketer is, like, you know, cut in half. Right? But it means that you can be a lot smarter about how you, as a marketer, are positioning content, creating nurture paths, and then how you are enabling sales with that insight as well.

Uzair Dada
27:07 - 27:49
Josh, I've heard a lot of different opinions on when we all fill the forms that which is our favorite thing. When we are, we love being truthful. We love getting all this information. We are very thoughtful about the boxes we check.
Alex and I spent fifteen minutes thinking about the answer before we click that submit button. Right? Is there any data insight you have? Because I'd love to, I love that idea of asking additional questions, but I just know that in the quest of filling a form, we digitally are so go. We don't even look at what it is. We just check Yeah. Yeah. What it is.

Josh Baez
27:49 - 29:09
Well, here's the thing. Right? Like, we have 8,000,000 data points suggesting that buyers don't give a crap about forms, that they'll do it if the content is good. I think that this whole discussion around forms like, I have a different four letter word that I wanna use to describe the situation that also starts with an f. I won't say that here.
I just think that it's like, what are we doing? Like Yeah. This is it it's like shining like a like a set of, like, shiny keys in front of a baby. And it's like, pay attention to this problem that isn't actually a problem instead of focusing on, like, what is behind the form? Like, what does the form enable you to then do as a marketer for your buyers? Because if, for example, if you don't have a form, you don't know who the person is, you have to invest tens of thousands of more dollars to try and find out who that person is. You don't understand the reasons why they engaged, and you don't have opportunities for further qualification.
So why are you hamstringing yourself just because someone on a webinar told you, oh, forms are bad. Like, we shouldn't do forms. But, like, why? Like, I genuinely, like, fill out tons of forms every day. I don't think once about it.

Uzair Dada
29:09 - 29:13
Not filling the form. I'm saying asking additional questions. Because filling form is not as big a hurdle as people think. The question is, we fill the forms really fast.
So if I ask additional questions because there's been a lot of studies that have been talked about. If you go over four fields, there's a massive decay in form completion. Yeah. In general. I don't know if you guys have any data on adding additional BANT questions because I've done that before. But I still question the quality of responses to those things to be actioned.
Maybe they're directionally right, but that's a interesting thing that I always struggle with, kinda sort of guiding our customers about, should you go ask those two additional BANT questions or whatever other questions you may have. We've tried things in the past for joint customers where we asked, hey. Would you like to have someone from the sales team call you out if you're ready to talk.

Josh Baez
30:03 - 31:44
Yeah. I think that it's definitely a balance. Right? Like, this is it's no it's not black or white. It's not no form or full form. Stephanie just mentioned in the chat, like, maybe it's an optional field. Like, yeah. That's an option for sure. We also have the technology today where fee where forms if they know who a user is, forms can automatically be completed for the most part. Right? And so I think that understanding the full scope and capability of your tech stack is really critical here.
Because I think that it is, like, a much more nuanced strategy than just ungate everything versus gate everything. Like, there is a balance. But I think that on the like, thinking holistically about, you know, the the health of a of a pipeline, I think that having a form there is much more valuable to the marketer, the salesperson, and the buyer than, assuming that, you know, buyers hate filling out forms, and therefore, you should never invest in a form ever again.
Like, just, like, to go on a tangent real quick. Like, I hate, website chat as, like, things that always pop up. Like, I find that far more intrusive than a form. And so I think that, like, we have different perspectives and opinions about technology. And so, you know, again, content syndication is just one piece of that, just like chat is another piece. Like, we need to invest in all that we can to get our buyers, you know, in the preferences that they have.

Uzair Dada
31:44 - 31:51
Yeah. We are all unique. We have different preferences, and we actually have different preferences for modalities at different points in time.

Josh Baez
31:51 - 31:54
Right. That's true.
That's a really good point.

Uzair Dada
31:54 - 32:37
Yep. I love a good chatbot and a website if I can get to what I want. It's everything is everything sucks because it doesn't work. Right? But if it works, it's the best thing in the world. And so it's just sort of like and and the cool part as as we sort of talked about earlier, things are getting so much better with the all the AI-based evolution that's happening and becoming more respectful in a way where you're trying to get people to information they want in a much easy way to get the answers they want, because that's really all we're doing. We're trying to facilitate a path. So.

Alex Jonathan Brown
32:37 - 34:54
So we are coming up on time. We are about to roll into my favorite new part of coffee break, our Piping Hot Takes where we get each of our speakers and myself, thirty seconds where the other two of us just kinda shut up. We let them have the floor for a bit.
But before we do that, I wanna go with what I'm calling a mini hot take related directly to what you were just talking about, which is that it's 2025. And if your audience doesn't have name, email address, auto filling to fill out a form so they don't have to think about it, you probably don't want them as your audience anyway.
Like, on that level, at least, we've evolved. It's not a huge deal. It's gonna be there when they see the form in the first place. They're gonna click send. Okay. That's my mini hot take.
So I'll give the two of you some time. I'm gonna roll into my piping hot take and take a deep breath and go.
For some reason, I think it's so easy for us as marketers to forget that the people that we're marketing to are people. And having, like, any empathy for them whatsoever, any ability to put ourselves in their shoes. So when we do that thing of, like, oh, they downloaded a piece of content. We should call them right away.
Like, no. You know that you would hate that. You know that that would be a bad interaction with that company. But when leads show up and we get the idea of, like, oh, maybe this is our next $300,000 deal. Would you buy something for $300,000 that you learned about fifteen minutes ago? Of course not. We just forget that that's how human beings work, and we lose our minds about it.
So you're marketing to people. Treat them like people. Warm them up a little bit. And, yeah, everything just works better when we do that. That's my piping hot take. Uzair? Josh? Who would like to go next?

Uzair Dada
34:54 - 34:56
Go for it Josh?

Josh Baez
34:56 - 35:06
Oh, gosh. I feel like I'm so full of piping hot takes. And then whenever I get asked about them, I'm like, oh, there's nothing wrong with the industry at all. Like, the industry is fine.
Josh Baez
35:08 - 37:11
Here's my piping hot take. I gotta also take a deep breath because I think that I'm gonna get too hot.
I've been thinking a lot recently about, like, the industry's willingness to live, evolve, be bold, be curious. And I think that more organizations need to, like, really have that clear path.
Like, do we want to survive or do we wanna thrive? Right? I think that technologies make that obviously a little bit easier to come to terms with and and have an answer for. But even beyond that, like, going back to your roots around why did you go to marketing in the first place? Like, was it really just to send another crappy email? Like, was it really just to, like, flood the market with, like, AI generated content that all sounds the same? Like, no.
Like, that's not why we do what we do. And I think that as an industry, we owe it to ourselves and to those around us to be constantly pushing the bar up of what is possible and what we can do to make the entire industry, like, more exciting, like, more interesting.
Like, you look you you talk a lot about, like, oh, like, B2B doesn't have to be boring. But then, like, prove it. Like, I think that we at NetLine are doing a really good job. Like, we are doing our best, like, as a small, like, six person marketing team to, like, be bold. But I think that, you know, like, it's a team effort. Like, what is that? Like, rising tides raise all sales or boats or something. I'm not a fisherman. But I think that, you know, the creativity at our disposal is, like, it's limitless, and we really I think that we owe it to everyone to, like, push that up.

Uzair Dada
37:11 - 37:17
Yeah. I think that was super cool.
And, you know, building on that, I just finished the second season of Severance. I'm gonna use my Severance analogy.
Josh Baez
37:17 - 37:20
Oh, there you go.

Uzair Dada
37:20 - 38:28
So I think us marketers, I feel, have severed brains. And we sort of, when we talk to each other, we acknowledge that this is what's how it should be. We all agree. No one disputes the conversation. Everyone's shaking their heads. But then as soon as we go through the corporate door, boom, the innie comes out and forgets what the outtie said and agreed to.
And we go back to being hamsters in a wheel. That's the truth. So we almost need a reintegration moment. Right? Like, realize, really, what we are talking about and actually be bold, as you were saying, and actually do and there is absolutely no reason not to do it. And I think there is a the heart there's two things that I think negate people from being bold. One is a enormous pressure from the top of promised vanity metrics. That causes everyone to just shut up and just do. That's got to stop. Right? We have to do. And the second is for us to forget to optimize what we have and have this innate desire to add more to this recipe.
We keep adding, and we don't know how to delete. And there's no way. You cannot master everything. So focus on what you have. Use it well. Use it better. Master it, and then keep getting better because the tooling is all there. So I think if we just back to simplify and be bold in challenging some of the status quo that exist, we'd be better.
So so my, you know, thing would be focus on sort of that message. Focus on getting reintegrated into what we all believe should be the way and not have an innie and outie moment because that happens every day. So that's my hot take.

Alex Jonathan Brown
39:38 - 39:57
So when we pitched the idea for this piping hot takes, it was honestly sort of a backdoor way for us to get good clips for social, I'll be honest. But it's always like, oh, are people gonna show up with, like, takes that are gonna clip well? And then Uzair says marketers have severed brains, which is gonna be on LinkedIn in three days just so everyone knows that's going out. Josh, Uzair, thank you both so much for this fantastic conversation.
Obviously, we could do this for another two hours. But, I do wanna give everybody a chance before we wrap things up, to do a little plug, plug your LinkedIn, your website, whatever you wanna do. Josh, you've got a report out, over at NetLine. Anything else that you wanna chat about?

Josh Baez
40:23 - 40:44
Oh, gosh. You can find out more at netline.com. There's a lot that we have planned, especially in the next few weeks. So, yeah, keep an eye out. We've got some fun, bold things, in the works. So yeah. Thanks for having me, Alex. This is great. I feel like, yeah, you guys should have a longer version of this called, like, Lunch Breaks. There you go, man.

Alex Jonathan Brown
40:44 - 41:10
Usually these run a little long. So is there I can sort of do the plugs for both of us. Obviously, you can learn more about everything we're doing at Iron Horse over at ironhorse.io. We've really been churning out content lately. So if you haven't checked it, in the last little bit, there's a ton of new good stuff up there. Uzair, anything else more specifically you wanna point people to, other than go follow Uzair on LinkedIn? He's really good on LinkedIn.

Uzair Dada
41:10 - 41:26
No. No. There's a lot of cool stuff that the team is doing. We love working with partners like Josh and NetLine. So, yeah, hopefully, give us feedback. Be bold. Be brave. Let's go kill it.

Josh Baez
41:26 - 41:27
Mic drop. There you go.

Alex Jonathan Brown
41:27 - 41:38
It's so much more aggressive than my usual outro, but I'm gonna do it anyway. But now it's gonna be underwhelming. So, again, thanks so much for joining us. And wherever you are, break's over. Let's get back to work. 

Josh Baez
41:38 - 41:49
Back to work.

Alex Jonathan Brown
41:39 - 41:42
Back to work. Bye, everybody.