Anthony is the CMO at Hopin, the leading shared experiences company. Previously, he was the CMO at Front, and also the founding CMO of Gainsight where he and his time were credited with creating the Customer Success category. By focusing on human first community building, content marketing, live events and creative activations, we developed a new playbook for B2B marketing that built the Gainsight brand and fueled the company’s growth from $0 to over $100M of ARR, and eventual strategic partnership with Vista Equity at a $1.1B valuation.
This episode features an interview with Anthony Kennada, CMO of Hopin, an event technology platform that recently garnered a $7.75B valuation.
On this episode, Anthony takes us behind the scenes on Hopin’s explosive growth, how he and his team are trying to redefine webinars, and why he believes every company needs to start acting like a media company.
“The word webinar sort of evolved into a way for us to not say the word event and basically get away with lower production. An basically, what we've figured out is one, the bar to produce great high quality content is much lower now because of, again, products like Hopin. But also the consumer expectation is around entertainment. It's no longer around the crappy slide by slide, whatever our brains can't handle more information. So we're naturally biased towards the most engaging, entertaining and fulfilling types of content. And so it's almost got a bad brand reputation, that word webinar, but really it's an event. It's an experience. And it's a shared one. It's not just one person talking to another person, but you're talking to a room, a group, or a community of people that are gathered there to hear you.”
“Brand is the statement of why an audience should pay attention to your company. What do you stand for? What is the change you want to see in the world and how do you really leverage it through your different marketing channels? People buy things emotionally. And so if you can build an emotive brand, that could be the biggest demand gen tailwind you can possibly come up with and a very scalable and sustainable one too.”
“Every company needs to start acting like a media company or risk going out of business, pure, plain and simple. And when the cookie-less future that we're all staring down comes to light, the companies that survive are the ones that caught this early and were able to start investing in building their own content moat around the business.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(2:05) - Anthony’s first job in marketing
*(2:45) - More about Anthony’s role at Hopin as CMO
*(4:05) - Segment: The Trust Tree
*(6:41) - Who’s the buying committee for Hopin
*(8:37) - How Anthony’s marketing team is organized
*(14:23) - How events have changed over the last 18 months
*(25:15) - Segment: The Playbook
*(29:45) - The investments Anthony makes into brand
*(31:54) - How to think about investing in content
*(35:30) - Segment: The Dust Up
*(38:45) - Segment: Quick Hits
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