In this episode, we dig into how Nicole Baer thinks about B2B marketing as an emotional discipline, not a rational one. She shares how she rebuilt Carta's brand through customer storytelling, why brand investment shouldn't be sacrificed for performance marketing, and how AI is reshaping Carta's go-to-market from sales call analysis to synthetic market research. Along the way, Nicole reflects on launching a product during the pandemic at Logitech, the philosophy of "specificity" she and Carta's CEO use to guide creative decisions, and what she'd do with unlimited budget and a full-bore OOH experiment. About the guest: Nicole Baer is the CMO at Carta, the ERP for private capital, where she leads brand, demand generation, content, and go-to-market. Before Carta, she held CMO and senior marketing roles at Logitech, Zendesk, and Aon Hewitt. She is known for her belief that B2B marketing is just as emotional as consumer marketing and for building brand strategies that earn affinity rather than just attention.

In this Brandformance Office Hours episode, we dig into why clicks don't always turn into pipeline and what B2B marketers should actually be optimizing for. Rex walks through how to feed the right conversion signals back to ad platforms, why proxy metrics matter early on, and how to earn more budget by proving out cost per MQL before moving down funnel. We cover channel selection — why Google search is a no-brainer most B2B companies skip, why Meta is wildly misunderstood, and when Bing actually makes sense — plus the case for leaning into AI bidding instead of fighting it, why creative diversity is now table stakes, and where incrementality and AI search ads are headed in 2026. About the guest: Rex is the founder of Summit Chase, a paid media agency, and previously led paid media at HubSpot for over a decade. He also advises companies on paid media strategy. His work focuses on helping B2B teams move beyond vanity metrics and build paid programs that actually drive pipeline.

In this episode, we dig into how the brain actually processes marketing and why most “attention” metrics fail to capture what really drives behavior. We talk about the difference between being seen and being remembered, why subconscious decision-making matters more than post-purchase rationalizations, and how brands build long-term relevance by encoding meaning into memory. Along the way, we unpack why personalization isn’t the same as connection, what marketers get wrong about measurement, and how neuroscience can help teams design creative that doesn’t just perform, but sticks. About the guest: Pranav Yadav is the founder and CEO of Neuro-Insight, a neuromarketing research company focused on measuring subconscious response to advertising and brand experiences. His work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, culture, and behavior, helping marketers understand how people form emotional associations, encode memory, and make decisions long before they can explain them.

In this live Brandformance Office Hours episode, Matt Hammel digs into what “teach first, sell second” actually looks like in practice and why education has become one of the most effective growth levers in modern go to market. He breaks down how AirOps uses clear value exchange, genuinely useful content, and systematic reuse to build trust in crowded markets, then connects that approach to how AI search is changing discovery. Along the way, we cover information gain content, why freshness now matters more than volume, when to refresh or prune old posts, and why the teams winning in AEO and GEO are pairing technical systems thinking with real marketing taste. About the guest: Matt Hammel is the co-founder and CEO of AirOps, an end to end platform helping teams win in AI search. He is also a well-known LinkedIn creator with a clear voice on what is changing in SEO, AEO, and content operations. At AirOps, Matt has helped shape a teach-first growth model built around expert led webinars, AirOps University, and first party research, all designed to help marketers stay ahead as organic discovery continues to change.