How HubSpot Built a 50-Million-Person Media Engine Inside a Software Company with Jonathan Hunt

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Marketing Architects welcome to adspeak, Adweek's podcast about the business of marketing, media and creativity. In this episode, we're sharing a conversation recorded live at Brand Week featuring leaders from across the industry discussing the ideas shaping brands right now. Let's get into it. Hey everybody, I'm Mike Bayman. I'm Adweek's chief of staff. I oversee strategy and operations. And I'm really excited today because we're we get to have a really interesting conversation with another media operator, but a media operator that is not like almost any other media operator in the industry. Jonathan Hunt, who is the VP of Media for HubSpot, is a media operator through and through, but has a very different approach than many other companies. We're going to spend the time here talking about why running a media company inside of a software organization is a little bit different and some of the strategies that maybe you can also take away too. So with that, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate the time. First and foremost, what is HubSpot Media? Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I think first, it's probably worth saying, what is HubSpot? Sometimes folks don't know what HubSpot is. So HubSpot is a platform that helps people grow their business, whether you're a marketer or seller, an entrepreneur or a customer success representative. And HubSpot Media supports that mission by creating editorially independent content through dozens of different YouTube channels, podcasts, newsletters, creator partnerships. I mean, some of these brands you might know, like the Hustle or My First Million if you listen to or watch that podcast or you know, our AI newsletter Mindstream, but we do that and reach about 50 million people every single month and convert tens of thousands of them into leads for HubSpot. So you are by any metric a large media organization based on your audience, based on the amount of content you produce. Just out of curiosity, why have other companies in your mind not embrace the strategy of owning media or operating media companies inside of their organizations? Yeah, you know, I think you're starting to see that trend, but it's a little bit further behind. I think oftentimes there's a little bit of uncertainty if you're a larger marketing organization doing something like creating or acquiring a media company. I mean, whenever you invest money into direct response, you put a dollar and you see immediate results and you know, like where that money is going to. Whenever you're investing in content, sometimes you don't see the results for six months. But I think what a lot of marketers are starting to find is that there's a lot of value in owning your distribution channels as opposed to renting them and then having to invest in like meta or LinkedIn every single month and see that money evaporate. With media, you're investing in something that continues to amortize over time and becomes this direct line to audiences where right now becoming harder and harder to be discovered by or to reach your customer. Right. You see it through search trends and the sort of headwinds there. You see it through rising paid media costs. You know, people's attention are going to different channels and oftentimes there's our channels like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, newsletters, podcasts. And so that was really the impetus for us to really go all in on building out a media network within HubSpot. So again, media being bought by companies for marketing is not yet a new or novel concept. There have been over the years companies that have dabbled in it. They bought a well known brand and said, we will run this as a media company and then ultimately feel that maybe it wasn't the right decision. But HubSpot, you have done that, you've invested more in it, you've made acquisitions and you've really put a big step forward in it. It's worked. What do you attribute it to? So I think the thing that you're alluding to is that oftentimes I think the instinct is to, okay, I'm acquiring this media asset now, it's going to become a megaphone for my product. And so instead of talking about widget, so you're now talking about my CRM. And so that's the Exact opposite of what we do. Because what we see whenever we're building out media assets or acquiring media assets is that you're acquiring the trust in the audience. And the very worst thing you could do is erode that, because then why did you buy it in the first place? And so every media asset that we have is completely editorially independent. They're focused on a specific customer profile that maps back to a product within the HubSpot portfolio. But we let our video producers, our writers, our editors, our podcast producers, our creators take those insights and then translate that into what they feel like is most resonant with their audience on their platform. The difference with our media model is that we just monetize it a little bit more differently. So let's talk about that. How do you monetize this? If you are, you know, for all intents and purposes, a media operator, what are your metrics of success? Yeah. So I think in traditional media models, what you're doing is you're trying to generate as many impressions as possible. And those could be video views, it could be unique newsletter opens. It could be, you know, impressions on YouTube or TikTok. Because you monetize that at a CPM, or if you're doing sponsorships, you know, you're selling into the idea that you're being able to reach x many millions of people, that's fine. But what we're really trying to do is grow around intent. So as opposed to quantity, it's really like the quality of the impression that we're trying to generate. So we do that because ultimately, the way that we monetize is we're trying to encourage someone to be so inspired or entertained or educated by a piece of content that they want to take a secondary action. And that secondary action is oftentimes giving us their contact information to be able to get a resource of some type. It might be a business idea database, it might be a prompt library, it might be business case studies. It could be original research. But then that thing goes into a nurture funnel, and then our sales team takes that and tries to turn that into a customer for HubSpot. And so that's how we think about monetization. There are some examples where we do monetize traditionally because it's advantageous for you to do that from a strategy perspective, like YouTube, for example. You know, you turn on a TrueView because YouTube is trying to generate as many impressions as well because they want to make money. And so it's more advantageous for you to be able to turn that on and make a little bit of money there as well, because you have more visibility. But 99% of what we do is really focus on lead generation. So to that end, where are the platforms that you want to connect with, with audiences? Do you treat your audience the same way as a traditional media company? Little background. Jonathan came from Vice. Do you think differently about connecting with the audiences because you have a secondary maybe objective than selling advertising? Yeah, so we definitely go to where the conversion rates are highest. And so we track that down to like the individual monthly reoccurring revenue per video, per channel, per brand. But where we're seeing the most upside is really investment in video. Why? Video as a format, it's the currency of every single channel. You think of like, like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Now X, LinkedIn, even, you know, more. So it's all becoming a video platform. And so an investment in video is an investment in a multi platform strategy. At the same time, what we're seeing is that people are no longer going to search to learn how to do something or to get an answer. And sometimes they're not necessarily going to traditional media brands to learn something or find an answer to what they're trying to do. They're going to people because people inherently trust people. And oftentimes what we do is we're investing in people on camera, people on a podcast, individual creators. And so YouTube for us has become the single largest source of both audience growth, but also demand growth and also MRR growth for our organization over the last couple of years. Newsletters has also had a kind of like an interesting renaissance over the last couple of years as well, especially with the emergence of platforms like Beehive and Substack. But we're seeing a lot of growth there and then direct creator partnerships as well, for all the reasons I mentioned. Mentioned. Yeah, so you mentioned search and when you purchased the Hustle, a lot of the content not only was the newsletter, but also through SEO. Right. And that strategy made a lot of sense in November 2021 and maybe even made sense in November 2022. And then that little thing, ChatGPT came around. I want you to take me back. What was your first reaction when you saw chatgpt? So I'm having a lot of PTSD right now. That was a very, that was a very dark moment for all of marketing, especially media. Yeah, I think ChatGPT, if you look at like the trend line of big technological shifts in media and marketing, ChatGPT precipitated what I think is now the Current state of marketing, you know, we call it loop marketing, which is humans and AI coming together to create, but also personalize your messaging and your content on a one to one level and to just move a lot faster than how I think marketers traditionally move, which is very campaign based and it's very linear. Like you can no longer afford to be that way. You have to be a lot more loopy, but you also have to be a lot more iterative. And so we saw that as a reason to create a new marketing framework. But also, you know, we said to ourselves, well, thank God we weren't over invested in search. You know, like we had been investing in platforms like YouTube, creators, newsletters, podcasts for many, many years before that. So the landing was a little softer. But I know some companies and some CMOs that weren't doing that and as a result, you know, they are having to catch up right now. So to that end is written editorial content because again, you still do wear the media operator hat. Is that still an important part of the product mix? Yes, it just looks a little different. So we are creating still a lot of text based content, a lot of it in newsletter form, but we're also optimizing for not just humans discovering it, but robots discovering it. So, you know, it's called aeo Right Answer Engine Optimization. We've kind of pivoted our strategy toward that because what we were finding is that while LLM traffic is still just a drop in the bucket relative to referral traffic from Google, the intent's a lot higher. And then ultimately the value of a click back from an LLM like ChatGPT is 3x higher than what we were seeing on search. And so it would behoove us to invest even more in trying to optimize our brand visibility and citation volume within the LLMs. And right now, whenever you look at us relative to the Salesforce or Monday, like that investment has definitely paid off. So to that end, if you're a media operator and a marketing leader, should you be afraid of AI or embrace it? Because it sounds like you all took a very different path than a lot of media companies, which is you are looking to get onto LLMs as much as possible. The answers that ChatGPT, Claude and everybody else puts out. Yeah, I would say embrace it, but responsibly. Right. I think what has caused a lot of the sort of slowdown in adoption or some of the sort of nervousness around AI is like one, it's going to take my job to all the gaffes that you see of like six armed people and like really bad looking ads that people are sort of positioning as like the future of brand marketing, which it's not how you think about it is everything has to be human driven, AI assisted. Right. And so ways that we do that right now is today AI is helping us with things like localization. Right. So a lot of our media strategy has historically been very much focused on the North American market. But we have a huge customer base and a huge TAM outside of there. So Latin America, doc, France, apac, et cetera, that are also facing the same kind of headwinds that most marketers have been facing in North America through search. Right. And that being decimated. And so they are looking for things like a YouTube strategy to help diversify. So being able to take what we've done here in North America and use a tool like Heygin for example, to train and then localize content with near 90% fidelity in those local markets in their local languages has been a complete game changer for them. Everything is still fact checked by a native language speaker and made sure that you know, it's like tested and like actually like ready to ship. But to me it's like going from a place where you have no video strategy to a place where there's like a 90% fidelity. I would take that any day. We're using it for repackaging content. So an investment in video into text form or into audio form, we're using it for outlining scripts within video to just accelerate that part of the pre production process. We're using it for personalizing email. So there's a lot of different use cases. But nowhere in those examples is AI doing the work for the person or like taking the place of a person. Sorry, it's just helping people multiply their output. So again, from a marketing standpoint that makes a lot of sense. But as the media operator as well, how do you ultimately think that AI is going to kind of change the content creation process one year from now? What is the role of a creator and a kind of marketing creative or an editorial creative in the process? Yeah. So I mean there probably will be some roles that go away. Right. Like I'm just going to pick on copy editing for a second. Like do you need a whole entire team of copy editors? Maybe not. Could that be done by fewer copy editors? Maybe so. But there are going to be roles where a creator is a good example that AI becomes a superpower. Right. Like if you're a creator, you're a solopreneur. And being a solopreneur is very difficult. You don't have a marketing team, you don't have a finance team, you don't have a sales team. AI can help be all those things for you. It can turn you into a generalist marketer where you don't need specialists to be able to do things like blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the bull. Spend LinkedIn lets you target by company job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com campaign terms and conditions apply. If you like marketing conversations with actual receipts, not vibes, not vanity metrics Quick recommendation for you. I've been listening to the Marketing Architects podcast and it's one of those shows that makes you stop and think for a second. They dig into effectiveness research around topics marketers love to debate like TV advertising, measurement, AI, and what happens when brand and sales goals collide. It's thoughtful little contrarian in the best way and focused on ideas you can take back to your team for smart, honest marketing conversations on crafting goals your CMO and CFO agree on. Search for the Marketing Architects wherever you're listening Right now, Marketing Architects create the ad because it can create the ad for you. It might not be as good as if an individual creative did it, but you can't afford that. So AI helps you do more with less. So I think that's like a really good example. But at the end of the day, I do think AI is really meant to be a multiplier of output. It's meant to really help you unlock creative and productivity opportunities that were otherwise out of reach before. And it's really meant to help people that aren't media teams of 70 or marketing teams of hundreds of people be able to operate like that. So you mentioned that the content creation process is certainly going to change. I also imagine too, as you mentioned earlier, the fact that you're getting more intentional leads from ChatGPT is also changing how you're targeting and thinking about your cohorts. Are there examples of how AI is changing how you are going out and reaching your audience in a slightly different way besides, of course, you know, just making sure that you show up on the models? Yeah, well, it's Been really helpful in terms of. And I'm going to get kind of like nerdy and technical here. Synthetic testing. So with AI, you can create a synthetic Persona of your customer profile. So historically, you might have to go and create something, do some focus groups, talk to people. You still probably want to do a little bit of that, but then you can take all that information, create a synthetic Persona of the person you're actually trying to reach, and then be like, hey, does this make sense? Does this make you want to buy the product? So the AI is acting like your Persona without you having to spend a lot of money doing primary research or focus groups. That's then allowed us to sort of scale how we reach people on a more granular level because we can do that for different cuts of a, like a customer profile. So I think of marketers, you know, we can say, okay, does this resonate to you as a email marketer, as a performance marketer, as a brand marketer, as a media marketer? And it can sort of give us feedback in real time before we launch that creative. And so it just helps us move a lot faster, but can become a lot more targeted. Who we're speaking to makes a lot of sense. So you've talked about really great use cases for AI, but again, media operators and marketing operators are still thinking to themselves, this is still scary. What keeps you up at night around this? It's a really great question every once in a while. I mean, look, there are instances that we have found with trying to over optimize with AI usage where AI still has issues where it hallucinates or just straight up plagiarizes content. Like me as a publicly traded company, if I were to put out content that was highly plagiarized, that would be a huge IR disaster. My team would hate me for that. But I think it's getting better and we're creating like really great guardrails for that. And it's. Luckily that's never been an issue. So I think just like its propensity to hallucinate and plagiarize is always something that keeps me up at night. I think it's sometimes not in a marketer's instinct to move really quickly with these things because it feels a little like uncertain or a little, kind of like unproven. And I think in my mind, AI is just going to make you a more marketable marketer or a more marketable media operator, whether you're in your current job or not. And the person that's going to beat you is the person that actually leans into it and finds a real smart way of using it. So ultimately though, even though it might keep you up at night in that respect, it's not going to stop the process of it's all solvable. It's all solvable. And luckily, you know, we recently launched our own AI ethics and guardrails that we call craft. Both an external and internal kind of like framework for how we use and think about AI and how you disclose it and use it really ethically, that is a preventative for things like that. So besides, because that sounds like again, a very editorial kind of approach to the content, are there other scenarios? Because for all intensive purposes, what you are talking about, again, sounds like for all intents and purposes a media operator. Are there other ways you think about operating as more of a marketer even though you still are a media company? Yeah, I think, you know, we've just become a lot more content first. You know, I think traditionally with marketing campaigns, sometime it's the 32nd TVC or it's like the brand campaign, it's like the asset and that drives it and the comms there. So a good example is, you know, I mentioned earlier introduced a new framework for marketing in the AI era called loop marketing. That's been very helpful for a lot of our B2C and B2B customers. Really navigate something that's just like really complex and is changing every single day. And as part of that, we didn't approach it as a traditional brand campaign, we approached it as a content campaign because a lot of it is content and people connect with content, they share content and it's easier to translate that into content formats like video, audio, creator partnerships, text, et cetera. And it's become our highest performing campaign launch ever as a result of taking that content first approach and operating like a media company to be able to introduce a new concept to people and help drive awareness and adoption of something that was very foreign to them. And so I think it's just created like a new muscle for us in terms of how we think about go to market that historically we haven't really approached. So I asked this at the very beginning, why have other companies not embraced your strategy if you were to after this, kind of give some advice to people in the audience about how ultimately the importance of organic content and operating like a media company has really worked for. For HubSpot. What are the things that, you know, if you're thinking about maybe investing in media, you should be thinking about, you're listening to this podcast so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little CA cash back Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings by $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Yeah, I think understand that the payoff won't be immediate, but I would still also argue that maybe the day data you're seeing from your doctor ads and meta aren't necessarily real or the right data. You know, the quality maybe isn't as high. And also consider the fact that like when's the last time you bought something without really knowing about it? You know, like a great part about investing in media is that it's an always on strategy. It's a long tail strategy. And you're also really driving awareness and consideration that ultimately helps with cost efficiency on your doctor campaigns and supports other parts of your marketing funnel. And so that's how we think about it internally as well. If I were starting today as well, like the first stop would be video and creators video for all the reasons that I mentioned before. But also what's been really great to see especially on YouTube, is that your investment in a video from six years ago, it's still getting a lot of long tail traction. Like that thing is still being served up in browse, it's still being served up in suggested. You're still getting a lot of value. And just think about like the amortization of that investment. You don't get that same kind of return with a singular brand campaign or a doctor ad. And so that's why we're really bullish on it. And you know why? I would be a huge selfish, a huge advocate for other folks to continue to invest in that. So I am being mindful of the time. I do want to quickly ask about creators because you mentioned that before. How do you embrace creators as a partner and as a media operator? Yeah, so we work with creators on a bunch of different levels. Some of them might just be us identifying a creator that we believe has a certain relationship with a customer that we want to go after that we maybe don't currently reach and we might work with them to create a host red ad, but also custom content that's really native to their audience and the piece of content they're producing. But where I think we see the most upside is whenever we do long term deals with creators, the economics are a lot better. You know, as creators grow their CPMs, their rates get a lot higher. If you lock them in, if you lock them in up front at a much more competitive rate, you're ultimately saving money and you're ultimately sort of benefiting from their growth as well. Sometimes we're working with creators on a year long basis, sometimes two years, sometimes we just acquire them because they consistently show really cost effective value. You know, a good example is in October of last year we acquired an AI newsletter called Mindstream. Not the biggest AI newsletter, there were a couple hundred thousand subs. But from an editorial perspective they were completely differentiated, highly educational and they were more focused on implementation as opposed to education. Education content, it's a dime a dozen now. But how to actually take things you hear about AI and implement that within your own marketing strategy was there was just like an underserved editorial strategy out there for that. And so we acquired them and it's been one of our most successful acquisitions in recent memory because it's outperformed actual forecast for what they could generate in terms of business for our business. And it just has consistently been able to diversify across more formats that aren't newsletter. And so things like that pay off. But we try to find ways of working with creators long term because it's good for them, it's good for us, and ultimately everybody wins. So video is a important priority. Creators are an important priority. Embracing AI is an important tenant versus trying to fight it. A year from now, with all of this in mind, what would we expect HubSpot Media to look like? Yeah, bigger, more profitable, even more so than we currently are. You know, we have the aspiration to become the biggest business media company for folks that just want to excel in their careers. And today we're doing that at a really large scale. We haven't reached our ceiling so far. We have a lot underway for 2026 that might include acquisitions, will definitely include EMU, have any more video content. But the idea is to continue to really help all of our customers grow in their own career so that when they are in market and consideration to buy HubSpot, they buy us. It's really exciting. Well, a year from now we look forward to having this conversation again. Jonathan, thank you for your time. Cool. Thank you. That was a conversation recorded live at Brand Week. You can find more coverage, analysis and interviews from across the marketing and media world@adweek.com thanks for listening to AdSpeak. If you like the show, be sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline? That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had impression Cut the bulls back. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad NETWORKS. Advertise on LinkedIn. 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