Marketing Against The Grain

Matt Wolfe, founder of Future Tools and AI creator focused on tooling and workflows, shows how to build a personal AI second brain with Obsidian and Codex. He walks through clipping content, using Codex agents to process and interlink notes, automating nightly processing, and getting proactive briefs and grounded answers from your own wiki.

Aja Frost, Sr. Director of Global Growth and Paid at HubSpot, offers practical AEO tactics. Beeri Amiel, HubSpot product lead and XFunnel founder, demos tools to measure brand visibility in AI answer engines. They walk through building AEO setups, prompt-level tracking, share of voice and sentiment, and data-backed recommendations to win visibility in AI search.

They unpack why using AI to generate content first leads to repetitive, forgettable work. They explain the “Opposite Start” approach for flipping mainstream narratives to find blue-ocean ideas. They demo a Claude skill that researches trends, clusters narratives, and produces inverted ideation lenses. They show how an AI-driven brief can spark original hooks and storytelling directions.

A six-step framework for creating content search engines and AI cannot copy. How to turn proprietary data, firsthand experience, and a clear point of view into non-commodity content. Practical examples show specificity, original evidence, and an LLM-proof test. A free grader tool and tips for scaling the framework across blogs, landing pages, and newsletters.

They unpack the craze of spending huge sums on AI tokens and why token use can skyrocket without clear payoff. They contrast token-maxing with outcome-driven approaches and when AI ties directly to sales or support results. They offer practical rules for aligning spend with measurable outcomes and managing creative experiments to avoid waste.

Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle and Hampton and co-host of My First Million, joins to explore AI-driven search. They dig into Answer Engine Optimization, why citations and relevance now trump traditional authority, and how YouTube and long-tail prompts reshape discovery. Practical tooling, tracking prompts, and quick AEO tactics for small teams are discussed.

Sabrina Ramonov, solo founder of Blotato who helps creators scale with AI, walks through a Claude Cowork workflow that churns out 250+ social posts weekly. She covers teaching AI your brand voice, turning images into cross-platform drafts, generating visuals with Blotato, and automating scheduling via smart connectors.

AI tools are steering customers to competitors and brands may not even realize it. The episode compares recommendations from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity on the same CRM query. It outlines how different AI sources and signals shape those recommendations. Practical actions for auditing your brand in AI-driven search and steps to change how AI positions your business are highlighted.

Beeri Amiel, product leader and XFunnel founder who builds AEO tools; Aja Frost, HubSpot director who steers Answer Engine Optimization strategy. They unpack where AI actually finds answers, why blogs and listicles dominate AI citations, and how to measure influence via bot logs and citations. They also explore niche content opportunities, platform signals from YouTube/Reddit/LinkedIn, and why citations are fleeting and need constant refresh.

They unpack why great AI prompts and skills still produce bland marketing and point to a missing context layer. Pixar’s brain trust becomes a metaphor for shared creative context. Four foundational files are previewed to capture audience, style, positioning, and journey. Practical tips cover selective context loading and using performance data to evolve that foundation.