Bots now outnumber humans online, and account for more than half of web page requests. Jess Graham thinks that ratio should change what the website is for, what marketers measure, and where budget goes next.

As CEO and founder of Banquet, and someone who helped establish the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, Jess has spent enough time with AI safety researchers to doubt that marketers can reliably game LLMs for growth. She makes the case for trading SEO, AEO, and GEO for positioning, messaging, and owned channels like email, apps, loyalty programs, and direct mail.

Subscribe to 10 Minute MarTech for more conversations with marketing leaders, in ten minutes or less.

3 Takeaways:

• If unique website visitors are still a headline metric, your dashboard is built for the past.
• Email, apps, loyalty programs, unboxing and install experiences, and direct mail are where brands still control the customer relationship.
• GS1 Sunrise 2027 turns every product package into a channel for provenance, safety, allergens, and first-party data, giving brands a path out of dependence on retailers and ad platforms.

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:08) Back to Marketing Basics
(02:52) Is the Internet Dying?
(03:53) Rethinking Metrics & Owned Channels
(05:06) The Case for Bringing Back Direct Mail
(06:56) The Pay-to-Play Platform Future
(07:17) Curiosity as a Core Marketing Skill
(08:31) The GS1 Sunrise 2027 Opportunity
(09:39) Lightning Round & Hot Takes

About the Guest:
Jess Graham is the founder of Banquet, a commercial advisory for consumer brands. Technology is changing how people find brands, buy from them, and build relationships with them, and Jess advises companies on new paths to brand and revenue growth as those behaviors shift.

Her career spans two systems that shaped modern buying: nine years at Visa, studying how people actually pay and buy, from paper checks to Apple Pay, and Meta, where she led product marketing for Instagram and launched Reels helping build the plumbing for the attention economy.

Jess writes The Feast, an essay series on discovery, brands, and taste in the age of algorithms. She lives in the US and UK.

Connect:
Jess Graham: https://www.linkedin.com/in/discoveryinagenticcommerce/
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com

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Marketers who leave technology decisions to IT, a vendor, or a consultant end up running systems someone else designed. Ana Mourão, brand-side marketer and author of Strategic Marketing Skills, argues marketers should lean in and start those conversations themselves.

She tells Sara Faatz how a technology project becomes the opening to sit down with legal, IT, and e-commerce and say "let's address it together." That same instinct shapes how she runs experiments. She gets the CFO, CTO, and legal to agree upfront on what a test can and can't measure, then reports results in terms finance can put a value on. She also explains why knowing what not to automate is becoming a core skill.

Subscribe to 10 Minute MarTech for more conversations with marketing leaders, in ten minutes or less.

3 Takeaways:

• Marketers who start technology projects themselves become the architects of their marketing systems. The ones who hand those projects to IT, a vendor, or a consultant stay operators of campaigns and platforms.
• Before a test runs, agree with finance, IT, and legal on what it can prove and what it can't. Skipping that step is how teams end up treating correlation as causation, or treating walled-garden incrementality as the whole picture.
• Knowing what not to automate is becoming a core skill. Hand AI the boring, repetitive tasks and protect the parts of marketing people actually enjoy.

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:41) Skills Matter More Than Tools
(01:50) How Marketers Need to Evolve
(02:56) Experimentation That Proves Causality
(05:10) The Most Overlooked E in Marketing
(06:12) Reporting Metrics Stakeholders Actually Understand
(06:58) What You Should Never Automate
(08:26) The Biggest Aha Moment While Writing the Book
(09:24) Who Ana Follows Right Now

About the Guest:
Ana Mourão is a brand-side marketer and the author of Strategic Marketing Skills. After earning her degree in economics in Brazil, she moved to the US and spent 15 years at Fortune 500 companies, including 3M, Charles Schwab, and Marriott. There she worked on digital transformation projects that changed how those marketing organizations operated and used technology. That hands-on experience became The Experimental Marketer Framework, the foundation of her book. Today she helps senior marketers build the customer data strategy that makes AI, personalization, and cross-channel marketing deliver results, and helps them win back a voice in the technology decisions that shape their work. She volunteers on the Association of National Advertisers' Martech & AI Committee, contributes to MarTech's publication and conferences, and writes two marketing technology newsletters, one in English and one in Brazilian Portuguese.

Connect:
Ana Mourão: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamourao
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Ana’s Book: https://strategicmarketingskillsbook.com/

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Backlinks were supposed to matter less once AI started answering search questions directly. Harley Helmer says something closer to the opposite is happening: brand mentions that never earned a link at all are becoming one of the strongest signals a company can send to ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Mode.

Harley leads SEO at Americaneagle.com, where his team is building AI-search tracking from scratch, since no platform currently reports how often a given prompt gets asked.

In this episode, Harley details a four-quadrant framework for tracking branded and non-branded AI prompts, explains why repeating the same brand message across social, Wikipedia, and third-party sites now outweighs saying it once on your own site, and covers Google's new crackdown on exact-match anchor text backlinks. He also makes a call: Gemini and AI Mode will out-use ChatGPT by year's end.

Subscribe to 10 Minute MarTech for more conversations with marketing leaders, in ten minutes or less.

3 Takeaways:

• Track AI visibility the way you'd design a research study: split every question into branded vs. non-branded and aware vs. unaware, then watch the trend line over months, not weeks.
• An unlinked brand mention used to be worthless for SEO. For AI search, getting your brand named in the same context across multiple sites is now one of the strongest signals you can send.
• Google is cracking down on exact-match anchor text backlinks. A link that reads "Americaneagle.com did great SEO work" now carries more weight than one that just says "SEO services."

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:16) Why Prompt Tracking Matters Now
(03:06) A Framework for Tracking Prompts
(05:17) Offsite Signals for LLMs
(06:43) How to Make Your Site Agent-Friendly
(08:10) Backlinks Still Win
(09:14) Google's Crackdown on Link Spam
(10:42) Gemini vs. ChatGPT: Who's Winning?
(11:35) Who to Follow in MarTech Right Now

About the Guest:
Harley Helmer's path into SEO wasn't a straight line — he trained as a pastry chef and ran the pastry program at a well-known Chicago-suburb restaurant before deciding kitchen life wasn't the long-term fit. He moved into internet marketing and built a career on the same standard: prove real value for the people he's working for, not just theory. Today he works as a SEO Team Lead, AmericanEagle.com, where he helps clients define what their marketing strategy should actually look like and backs it up with hands-on execution experience.

Connect:
Harley Helmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harley-helmer/
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Americaneagle.com: http://www.americaneagle.com

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