Marketing Against The Grain
Hubspot Media
Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (Hubspot's SVP of Marketing), lead you down the rabbit hole of marketing trends, growth tactics and innovation. On the way you’ll pick up undiscovered strategies to give you that slight edge for success. These are not your typical twitter thread regurgitated marketing tactics that everyone is doing. These are new methods, with unfiltered examination of successful fresh ideas.
Episodes
Mentioned books
24 snips
Mar 26, 2026 • 28min
Claude Broke. Perplexity Built the App Anyway
A live AI build turns messy fast as two tools race to create a creator-partnership app for marketers. The conversation digs into functional specs, smarter prompting, MVP tradeoffs, and why context files can reshape the final product. Bugs pop up. A working creator hub appears. Then both prototypes get compared for speed, workflow, and next-step potential.
82 snips
Mar 24, 2026 • 19min
AI Is Making Your Marketing Worse (And How to Fix It)
Why AI is making marketing output feel bland and broken. A look at five new roles teams may need, from prompt strategist to agent ops manager. It also explores answer-engine discovery, autonomous agents, and how major brands are testing AI while trying to keep creativity and brand style intact.
69 snips
Mar 19, 2026 • 25min
This Content AI Agent Runs My 0-Employee Marketing Agency
Barbara Jovanovic, Startup Cookie co-founder and AI automation marketer, breaks down how she runs a zero-employee marketing agency with custom AI systems. She explores why post-webinar follow-up matters most. She shares a lean stack for turning webinars and podcasts into LinkedIn posts, newsletters, emails, videos, and branded multi-channel campaigns.
99 snips
Mar 17, 2026 • 28min
My 11-Skill AI Content Team (Built in Claude Code)
An AI-powered content team takes shape with 11 specialized skills. The conversation explores audience profiling, voice and style modeling, research workflows, and idea engines that spot winning patterns. It also looks at drafting stronger social posts, enriching them with examples, and using monthly feedback loops to keep the whole system evolving.
102 snips
Mar 12, 2026 • 21min
I Built a $20,000 AI Consultant You Can Have For Free
They explain a free $20K-level AI transformation skill you can use to map and improve real workflows. They cover recording work, turning transcripts into AI-driven processes, and packaging files for Claude, Perplexity, or ChatGPT. They show how to scope task reports, convert tasks into AI-assisted workflows, and design reusable skill architectures for practical pilots.
47 snips
Mar 10, 2026 • 17min
This One Chart Exposes Why Most Companies Are Failing At AI
They dig into a chart that reveals why companies struggle to turn AI potential into real use. Conversation covers why better models alone do not win and how embedding AI into workflows is the real challenge. They explain the human adoption gap and present a practical Rapid5 framework to redesign organizations into AI-native operations.
78 snips
Mar 5, 2026 • 27min
Perplexity Computer: The Super Agent Playbook (5 Real Workflows)
They explore super agents like Perplexity Computer and how connector-driven skills are reshaping workflows. They demo building a book-cover design skill and other real-world task automations. They discuss agentic teams, model choice, and practical ways to integrate AI with internal data. They stress iterating on skills, recording work to create reliable automations, and avoiding AI clutter.
138 snips
Mar 3, 2026 • 49min
Claude Code: Landing Page to Lead Magnet in 50 Minutes
James Dickerson, co-founder of Boring Marketing who builds agent-driven marketing workflows. He explains building landing pages and lead magnets with Claude Code in minutes. He shows how skills automate research, copy, and site launches. He demonstrates interactive lead magnets and programmatic page strategies.
90 snips
Feb 26, 2026 • 37min
We Tested an AI Agent That Builds 1000 Ads in 10 Minutes
Patrick Haede, founder of Superscale and maker of AI-driven ad tools, explains autonomous ad agents and AI-generated video avatars. He shows how agents can churn out huge volumes of ads quickly. The conversation covers brand avatars, training agents with brand context, and how affordable AI production could let small companies compete with big brands.
32 snips
Feb 24, 2026 • 15min
I Built a Team of AI Assistants That Live in My Email Inbox (Mail Manus Tutorial)
A deep dive into building inbox-native AI assistants for tasks like competitive research, content strategy, and data analysis. A walkthrough shows how custom email agents can auto-process competitor launches and newsletters. Practical setups cover Gmail filters, auto-forwarding, and workflows that return briefs and ranked content ideas directly to your inbox.
