Signal or Noise: The New Marketing Playbook Is Real — But It's Not for Everyone
The press release is dead. The blog post is dying. Video is the medium, the founder is the messenger, and the creator ecosystem is the new performance layer.
Let me open with the obvious joke: I am publishing this argument — about how video has replaced written content as the dominant medium for attention, trust, and commerce — as a written Substack post. I see the irony. Fully. I have been told, by people who are correct, that I should be recording this as a 12-minute video and dropping it on LinkedIn. I am aware that Sam Blond announced a $50 million funding round via a 90-second clip and got more engagement than most TechCrunch features generate in a month. I know. I am getting there. Consider this the last written piece before the inevitable pivot. Or don’t — maybe there is still a market for people who read. Either way: the argument I’m making here applies to everyone else much more urgently than it applies to me, so let’s get into it.
Something is shifting in how the most interesting growth-stage companies go to market — not just in their channel mix, but in the fundamental grammar of how they introduce themselves to the world. The press release sent to TechCrunch. The carefully crafted blog post on the company website. The coordinated media day. These were the rituals of the previous generation of startups, and they’re being replaced — not gradually, but suddenly — by a 90-second video posted directly to LinkedIn or Instagram by the founder, without a PR firm in sight.
At the same time, the marketing channels themselves are shifting. A year ago the conversation was about podcast CPMs and CTV placements. Now the sharpest operators are talking about something older and harder to measure: trust infrastructure. Who do your customers actually listen to? Where does credibility come from in a world where every brand can produce infinite content at near-zero cost? I’ve been watching two companies I know well navigate this — Insurify on the consumer side and Airwallex on the enterprise side — and want to use them as case studies for a broader argument about where marketing is heading and what it means for how you build a brand, launch a product, and decide where to spend.
The Signal Event
OpenAI didn’t buy a media company. It bought narrative infrastructure.
In early April 2026, OpenAI — fresh off a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation — acquired TBPN, a daily live tech talk show hosted by two former startup founders. The show had been running for about a year, with roughly 70,000 viewers per episode and $5 million in advertising revenue in 2025. OpenAI paid “low hundreds of millions” for it, then immediately shut down its advertising business. They weren’t buying the revenue. They were buying the relationship between two trusted voices and the audience that showed up every day to hear them.
OpenAI’s CEO of applications Fidji Simo was explicit in the staff memo: “The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us.” This is the same company whose Sora video generation launch generated more engagement through Sam Altman’s personal tweets than through any press release or TechCrunch exclusive. And it’s part of a pattern building for years — HubSpot acquiring The Hustle and My First Million, a16z buying Turpentine, Plaid acquiring This Week in Fintech, Robinhood launching Sherwood News. Technology companies are acquiring audiences that are pre-sorted by interest, income, and buying intent, and using them as narrative infrastructure rather than an ad revenue business. Insurify and Airwallex — the two companies I will focus on throughout this piece — are both executing versions of this in their respective markets.
How Companies Go to Market Now New
The press release is dead. The launch video is the new announcement.
There is a specific moment I keep pointing to when founders ask me about go-to-market strategy in 2025. Sam Blond — former CRO at Brex, former partner at Founders Fund, one of the most respected sales operators in Silicon Valley — announced his company Monaco’s $50 million Series B by posting a video directly to LinkedIn. Not a TechCrunch exclusive. Not a press release with a coordinated media day. A video, on a social platform, from his personal account, in which he told the story himself.
Monaco had gone from zero revenue to seven figures of ARR in each of its first three months after launch. The announcement landed not because a journalist wrote it up first, but because Sam Blond’s credibility — built over years as a recognizable operator in the startup ecosystem — made the news feel like an inside tip from someone you trust rather than a press release you have to skeptically parse. The company had Benchmark, Founders Fund, Patrick and John Collison, Garry Tan, and Jack Altman as investors. None of that needed a PR firm to translate it. It needed a messenger the audience already trusted.
This is not an isolated example. Airbnb runs all its feature releases through Brian Chesky’s personal account. The Yale students who raised a $5.1 million pre-seed for an AI social network in iMessage went viral entirely through a LinkedIn video they made about their launch. Goodfire used its $50M Series A announcement as “a flex, a manifesto, and a strong recruiting motion all at once” — a single video that hit 4.1 million impressions on X and drove more conversation than a month of press coverage would have generated. The a16z team has documented this shift extensively: founders who learn to “ride the algorithm” for product reveals can fill waitlists overnight and drive investor inbounds that a structured PR campaign can’t replicate.
The data confirms the direction of travel. 91% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool. 93% of video marketers report a strong ROI. Landing page conversion rates improve by up to 86% when a hero video is placed above the fold. LinkedIn native video gets 30% higher click-through rates than non-video ads, and live videos generate 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than static posts. Including the word “video” in an email subject line increases open rates by 19%. These are not marginal improvements. They are category differences in how people engage with content.
Here is the nuance that matters: AI-generated video does not work yet at the level that converts. The market tried this in 2024 — Q4 of that year demonstrated definitively that AI-generated content is, in the words of practitioners, “slop.” Audiences can tell. The specific kind of trust that makes a product launch land comes from authenticity signals that slop destroys: the specific cadence of a founder talking about something they built, the rough edge of a real setting, the visible conviction of someone who actually believes in the problem they’re solving. This is not an aesthetic preference. It is an information-processing reaction. When everything is generated and nothing is verifiable, the signals that prove human origin become more valuable, not less.
This is why companies like Insurify and Airwallex — both of which I’ll discuss in depth shortly — are spending serious money on high-production video for their brand campaigns. The videos embedded below are not cheap. They represent the kind of production commitment that runs $10–15 million to make and distribute at scale. That spend is justified precisely because AI-generated alternatives cannot yet replicate the production quality signals that tell a premium-seeking audience the brand is credible. You are paying for proof of investment, which is itself a trust signal in a world where anyone can generate a passable-looking video for free.
Example — Enterprise brand video
Airwallex: High-production brand advertising for B2B fintech
Airwallex’s brand campaign — high-production, cinematic, positioning the company against traditional banking. The production quality signals enterprise credibility in a way AI-generated content structurally cannot yet match. This is a $10–15M category of commitment.
Example — Consumer brand video
Insurify: Mass-market consumer advertising for insurance comparison
Insurify’s television-ready consumer spot — clean, direct, built for CTV and broadcast reach. The value proposition (save on insurance) lands in seconds. This is what the top of the funnel looks like when you have an existing digital base and conversion infrastructure to absorb the awareness it generates.
The rule for founders thinking about this: video is the medium, but it is not a substitute for substance. The Monaco LinkedIn launch worked because Sam Blond had a real company with real metrics and real investors. The Airwallex and Insurify videos work because the products actually deliver on what they promise. Video amplifies authenticity — it does not manufacture it. Use it to deliver real news in a human voice and the algorithm rewards you. Use it as a production veneer over an empty story and the audience sees through it faster than any press release ever could be debunked.
The New Brand Grammar New
The CEO is the first voice. The consulting playbook got this exactly backwards.
When I was in management consulting, there was a piece of received wisdom about the relationship between CEOs and advertising: when the CEO is speaking in the ad, it’s usually the death of the brand. The reasoning was sound for its time. CEOs are transient. Their personal credibility is not transferable to the next leader. A brand built around an executive’s face is a hostage situation — the day that executive leaves, the brand loses its anchor. The right approach was product and vision: let the brand speak for itself through consistent creative, character-driven campaigns, long-duration brand building. Procter & Gamble. Apple’s “1984.” GEICO’s gecko. Brand as institution, not as person.
That playbook has not just been modified in startup land. It has been inverted. And the data is compelling enough that it is worth taking seriously as a durable structural shift rather than a temporary stylistic preference.
Consider what is actually happening. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky announces every major feature release through his personal social accounts — and those posts consistently outperform the company’s brand accounts in both engagement and earned media. OpenAI’s most impactful communications come through Sam Altman’s personal channels. When Altman announced Sora, the reaction was driven primarily by his posts, not by OpenAI’s official accounts. Adam Robinson built his company RB2B to $4 million ARR while generating 21 million LinkedIn views — by spending 65% of his working time creating content about what he was building. The founder at Default grew pipeline by consistently posting authentic operational insights on LinkedIn, with clients reporting they signed contracts because they had been following his thought leadership for months before initiating contact.
Why has this flipped? Two reasons, and both are structural rather than stylistic. First: we are in an era of extreme content abundance and corresponding trust scarcity. The average person is now exposed to thousands of brand messages per day. The algorithm surfaces content based on engagement signals, and the content that consistently earns the highest engagement is authentic personal voice — not polished brand creative. In this environment, a CEO talking directly about why they built something, what they got wrong, what they learned, or what they believe is coming next, generates a category of trust that a brand campaign literally cannot replicate. It is not more expensive to create. It is structurally different in kind.
Second: in the B2B context specifically, the founder’s credibility functions as a purchase qualification signal. When a VP of Finance is deciding whether to evaluate Airwallex for their cross-border payments stack, one of the inputs is whether the company looks like it’s run by people who understand the problem. A founder who posts weekly on LinkedIn about the specific challenges of global treasury management — substantively, not promotionally — has pre-qualified themselves as someone worth taking a meeting with, before the sales team ever makes contact. Foundera’s client data shows that consistent founder LinkedIn presence correlates with a 30% reduction in sales cycle length. Prospects come warm because they’ve been following the founder’s thought leadership. That is a compressing of one of the most expensive phases of B2B sales — the trust-building phase — without adding a single SDR.
The old consulting wisdom — CEO in the ad equals brand mortality — was not wrong for the context it was designed for. It applied to large, institutionalized consumer brands where the CEO is a functionary and the brand architecture has to survive multiple leadership transitions. It does not apply to a 50-person startup where the founder’s specific credibility — their track record, their point of view, their operational scars — is the reason the brand has any differentiation at all. In startup land, the founder is not a face for the brand. The founder IS the brand at this stage, and the marketing budget spent anywhere other than amplifying that founder voice is often capital misallocated.
The risk is real and worth naming: founder-led brand creates a succession problem. When the CEO leaves or evolves away from the public-facing role, the brand can lose its anchor if no parallel institutional identity has been built. The best operators are aware of this and are simultaneously building owned content infrastructure — media properties, creator networks, community platforms — that can absorb and amplify the founder’s voice today while building audience relationships that survive the founder’s eventual transition. The goal is to start as founder-led and graduate to community-led. The mistake is to stay founder-led indefinitely without building the underlying infrastructure.
The new rule: The CEO speaks first, authentically, in video, on social platforms — not after the PR firm has approved the language. The brand creative follows to amplify what the founder has already established. This is not a democratization of marketing. It is a specific skill that some founders have and most don’t, and the gap between those who can execute it and those who can’t is becoming one of the most consequential competitive advantages in early-stage company building.
The Third Pillar
The creator economy is the new performance marketing
The 2020-21 DTC implosion was fundamentally a crisis of channel dependence. Billions poured into Meta performance advertising, CAC surged 222% over eight years, iOS 14 destroyed attribution, and brands that had built nothing but a paid-social relationship with their customers had nothing to fall back on. The response in 2022-23 was to find a new single channel: podcasts, CTV, streaming. Better — but not structurally different.
What is different in 2025 is that the most sophisticated consumer brands are running a three-layer stack: performance digital as the foundation, creator partnerships as the conversion bridge, and public media as brand amplification. Each layer does a distinct job. Performance closes in-market demand. Creators build the specific kind of trust that moves people from awareness into buying intent — and they do it at unit economics that traditional broadcast cannot match, because the relationship between creator and audience deepens over time. Brand advertising creates category-level recall and scale. The global creator market has grown from $1.7 billion in 2015 to $32.55 billion in 2025 at a 33% compound annual rate. Three in four online consumers say they’ve purchased a product after an influencer recommendation. DTC brands rank influencers as the projected top conversion channel in the back half of 2025 at 70%, ahead of social commerce.
What has changed in the past 18 months is the measurement infrastructure that makes creator marketing tractable at scale. AI-powered matching platforms now analyze historical performance, audience overlap, and brand affinity to predict creator-brand fit with meaningful accuracy. Early data from Agentio shows that by the eighth integration with the same YouTube creator, affiliate link click-through rates reach 1.8x the rate of the first — compounding returns that paid media cannot replicate. For B2B brands, the equivalent shift has occurred on LinkedIn and niche vertical podcasts: 85% of B2B marketers used influencer programs in 2024, and always-on programs report 99% effectiveness rates versus a 17x higher failure rate for episodic campaigns.
Case Study 1 — Consumer
Insurify: How a bootstrapped insurance marketplace cracked the three-layer stack
Insurify is an AI-powered insurance comparison marketplace — bootstrapped, Cambridge-based, with strong unit economics and a deep organic presence built over years of content and SEO investment. It is the kind of brand you find when you search “best car insurance quotes” at 11pm after a rate renewal notice lands in your inbox. R136 Ventures is an investor, so I have a direct window into the business — and what I can say is that the results across visits, conversions, brand search volume, and revenue have been material and real.
The value proposition does the heavy lifting. Two-thirds of American households are under financial pressure. The promise of “save $400 on your insurance in two minutes” resonates at a gut level without needing to be sold. Carrier underwriting dynamics are favorable: GEICO, Progressive, and major home insurers have returned to competition mode, meaning the savings Insurify promises are real and deliverable. A personal finance creator recommending Insurify to their audience isn’t doing an ad read — they’re giving their community a gift, which changes the emotional valence entirely. The creator reduces the effective CAC of every subsequent touchpoint.
“Digital has spent a decade telling us you can measure everything instantly and that it’s a good thing. The reality is it’s a very bad thing.”
— Peter Field, co-author, The Long and the Short of It
What makes Insurify’s case defensible is the sequencing. They built the organic base first. The Binet and Field research — 996 campaigns, 700 brands, 30+ years of data — is unambiguous: brands that allocate roughly 60% to brand building and 40% to activation outperform pure-performance players. WARC data shows the market inverted this to 68% performance and 32% brand between 2019 and 2024, and long-term effectiveness declines followed. Insurify’s three-layer approach is a rebalancing in exactly the right direction, with creator partnerships as the smartest component because they bridge brand and performance in ways that neither pure broadcast nor pure performance can replicate alone.
Case Study 2 — Enterprise
Airwallex: Sports first, creator layer next, founder voice throughout
Airwallex is a Melbourne-founded cross-border payments platform now operating globally, with $1 billion-plus in annualised run rate revenue as of late 2025 and $100 billion in annual processing volume growing at 73% year-on-year. It executed what is arguably the most deliberate and well-sequenced brand-building program in enterprise fintech, and the sequence itself is the lesson.
Sports sponsorship first: a multi-year Formula 1 partnership beginning early 2024, followed by a Premier League football club, and most recently an MLB jersey patch. The logic was explicit — break through the “dry, corporate, vanilla” noise of B2B marketing by occupying emotional territory that their competitors aren’t willing to pay for. Crucially, they made the sponsorship operationally real by becoming the actual financial infrastructure partner for one of those teams, not just a logo placement.
Creator and digital media next: partnerships with niche fintech and treasury-focused creators, LinkedIn thought leadership from senior operators, and now a full digital advertising layer targeting the mid-market buyer personas in their expansion markets. The VP of Global Marketing has been clear that the IP from sports — the footage, the access, the cultural cachet — feeds everything downstream: performance marketing creative, event activations, social content. Nothing sits in a silo.
The founder voice runs through all of it. CEO Jack Zhang and the senior leadership team maintain active LinkedIn presences specifically around topics their buyers care about: global treasury operations, cross-border payment infrastructure, the regulatory landscape in key markets. This is not casual social media. It is a deliberate trust-compression strategy — making sure that when a CFO or finance team eventually evaluates Airwallex, the company’s voice has already been present in their information environment for months.
The Paradigm Shift
The destination is owned trust infrastructure — not TV, not streaming
The uncomfortable implication of everything above is that the new media playbook — podcast, CTV, streaming — is real and it is working, but it is a bridge, not a destination. TV and streaming advertising still rents attention. The creator relationship compounds. The media property you own compounds. The founder voice you’ve invested in compounds. And the next performance channel — the 2025-2030 equivalent of “early Facebook ROAS” — is AI presence: whether your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI-generated recommendations, whether it appears accurately and favorably. Traffic to U.S. retail sites from generative AI sources jumped over 1,200% between July 2024 and February 2025. AI shoppers convert at 12.3% versus 3.1% for standard sessions. The brands that will appear favorably in AI-generated recommendations are those that have built trusted, creator-endorsed, expert-cited content ecosystems. Brands that only bought CTV placements will be invisible in that layer.
The companies that win the next five years are building creator relationships, founder voice platforms, media properties, and community infrastructure that they own, that compound, and that position them favorably in AI-mediated discovery. Podcast and CTV are excellent now. In three to five years, the brands that only did podcast and CTV will be looking for the next thing again. The brands that spent those same years building owned trust infrastructure will already have it.
The track record
When it worked, when it didn’t — and why
The bottom line
Four things are true simultaneously
First: podcast and streaming advertising are real, are working, and are structurally different from the 2020-21 Facebook dependency — provided you have the foundation. They are not a trick pony. They are the appropriate brand amplification layer for companies that have proven their performance layer and have the LTV and runway to let brand equity compound over 18-24 months.
Second: video is the medium, and the launch announcement via social video from a founder’s personal account has replaced the press release, the blog post, and the TechCrunch exclusive as the primary mechanism for product and company launches. High-production quality matters because AI-generated content cannot yet replicate the authenticity signals that audiences use to calibrate trust. This window where production investment creates competitive advantage will close as AI video matures — probably within 3-5 years — which means using it now while it remains defensible.
Third: the CEO is the first voice, and the old consulting playbook that said “CEO in the ad = brand mortality” does not apply to early-stage startups where the founder’s specific credibility is the primary differentiation. Founder-led marketing compresses trust-building timelines, reduces sales cycles, and builds the kind of authentic audience relationship that makes every downstream channel more efficient. The risk — that founder-led brand creates a succession problem — is real and should be managed by simultaneously building owned media and creator infrastructure.
Fourth: the paradigm is shifting from rented attention toward owned trust infrastructure, with AI-mediated discovery as the next performance frontier. The creator economy, owned media, and sustained founder voice are not marketing tactics. They are infrastructure investments in the audience relationships and content authority that will determine which brands appear — and appear favorably — in the AI conversation that is already becoming the dominant path to purchase.
For investors: the signal I am watching is not whether a company is running podcast ads or posting on LinkedIn. It is whether they are building an audience they own, a founder voice that compounds, and a content ecosystem that will position them favorably in AI-mediated discovery. The first two are execution. The third is the emerging moat — and most companies aren’t thinking about it yet.