Do This, NOT That: Marketing Tips with Jay Schwedelson

Several concrete, non-obvious tactical insights (actor day-rate arbitrage vs. influencer per-video deals, social engagement data as a sales signal, micro-creator identification heuristic) are genuinely useful, but roughly 35% of the runtime is AI hot-takes and friendly banter that dilutes the density.

“For influencers, I pay for a video. I pay for usage rights. For actors, I pay for the day, and then they go create, and what, what, what, what we create is what I own. So that was, like, the big arbitrage that I saw.”

“we're seeing every single person who's engaging with our posts, how much they're engaging with the posts, how long they've been following us for... I figured out that the COO of McDonald's was following our page on Instagram.”

The actor-for-a-day model applied to B2B SaaS content and the engagement-to-pipeline identification loop are genuinely fresh executional ideas, but the AI section retreads well-worn 'internet didn't kill jobs' analogies and adds nothing new to the discourse.

“I always win for us because I watch B2C. That's been my playbook the whole time.”

“For actors, I pay for the day, and then they go create, and what, what, what, what we create is what I own. So that was, like, the big arbitrage that I saw.”

Cunningham is a genuine practitioner who built and executed the organic content program at a $4B company from near-zero, with verifiable prior experience at Celsius and Fashion Nova; not a pure thought-leader, but also not quite C-suite depth.

“I ran content and influencer marketing for Celsius, for Fashion Nova, a lot of big campaigns in the agency prior to ClickUp.”

“Second month, we had a maybe three or four videos hit a million. Now the company's interested. They see a couple million impressions. They know what they pay for it.”

The episode is unusually specific on dollar figures, timelines, and named platforms (backstage.com, Zapier, specific impression counts by month), though conversion metrics and pipeline ROI remain vague, and the McDonald's anecdote ends with 'nothing's closed yet.'

“400 bucks and you can pay them for the day... another two, 200 for the day, and now you've got eight to 10 videos for under $1,000”

“I think we hit 25 million impressions in a month, and that's when they were like, 'Okay, how do you hit 100?'”

The host asks a few legitimately useful bridge questions (organic-to-pipeline, small-budget version of the playbook) but defaults to affirmation and agreement throughout, never probing conversion rates, cost-per-acquisition, or the limits of the model.

“you know, it's something I need to do a better job of”

“I totally agree with you because, you know, is when, when Excel came out, Microsoft Excel came out, they said CPAs were gonna go away”