In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Greg Edwards, Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: AI-accelerated content and outbound... done with a point of view. Greg's team used to spend months crafting "evergreen" pieces with subject-matter experts, then stretch them for years. Now AI gets them 70% of the way there, and the SME adds the angle only they can. Instead of a single master guide, they ship content tailored to the buyer's exact stage in the funnel. The result: higher-quality MQLs, better conversion to SQLs, and more closed-won. On the outbound side, AI-based SDR tooling scrapes for fit, reads LinkedIn activity, and writes personalized messages that "look honestly more human" than the marketing-speak of old.

The catch Greg keeps coming back to: AI is the average. "If we don't have a specific point of view as a service company, then we are the average of everyone else out there. We're not actually providing any value." The job now is to move at the pace AI makes possible while staying above-average and authentic — avoiding the AI slop that makes every brand sound the same.

Cooling off: traditional SEO and the mass email. Greg has watched organic search traffic fall as AI results eat the clicks, with referral traffic from AI engines rising to fill the gap. His advice for marketers who built a career on Google: restructure your back-end content for AI optimization, and lean harder into conversion rate optimization.

To close, Greg shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: prepping for a two-week family vacation, and finishing an AI-for-marketing course.

In this episode:

• Why AI gets you ~70% of the content, and why your point of view has to do the rest
• How "timely and specific" beats "evergreen" — and lifts MQL-to-closed-won
• Using AI SDR tooling for personalized outbound that reads as human
• What AI Overviews and zero-click search are doing to organic traffic
• Why conversion rate optimization is the new home for SEO talent
• Why the mass email blast is dying and what replaces it

About the guest: Greg Edwards is Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint. He spent 15+ years in digital marketing, cutting his teeth at Orange Soda, then Inside Out Development, is master-certified in account-based marketing, and holds an MBA from UVU. Early in his career, he spent time in Shanghai and speaks Mandarin.

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