Shane Hedge and Ariel Rubin are the CEO and Head of Content of Air respectively. Air is a Creative Ops Platform used by enterprise creative teams at companies like Google, Warby Parker, Perplexity, Ramp, and the Denver Broncos.
They’re at 100 employees, raised $70M in total ($35M Series B last year), just won a Webby Award for best creative AI, and have cut marketing spend by 90% and CAC by 70% over a period of 18 months using creative, unusual marketing.
Some of their stunts include:
taking out a full page ad in the New York Times called “AI would never smoke a cigarette with you” handwritten by Shane, with his real, PERSONAL phone number attached
Partnering with OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue
Shane traveling to a remote island in Iceland to trap the “best air ever” in a jar and documenting it
hiring elderly actors to stage a protest outside Adweek’s Commerceweek conference, holding signs like “Dropbox needs botox” and “I was 28 when I started downloading this file,” complete with a fake news crew
hiring the comedian Kareem Rahma as their Chief Imagination Officer, releasing a series of (fake) podcast clips of him making ridiculous points about creative work, then abruptly “firing” him, then “rehiring” him and making a mockumentary of it
In this episode, we talk about what makes a great marketing campaign, how to go viral, how they operationalize creative work at Air, why "trust" not "budget" is the bottleneck for great campaigns, and the 3-lane marketing team structure they run without a CMO.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
The aha moment that turned Air into the most creative company in B2B
What makes a viral campaign idea
How to convince your CEO to take more risks with your marketing
How to operationalize creative work
Why Air keeps a separation between “state” & “church” within their marketing org
Why one (big) campaign per month is the right cadence
The only thing that makes a risky idea work
Why Air refused to touch AI until Nano Banana dropped in Oct 2024
Ariel’s case for “discernment” over “taste”
Connect with Shane and Ari:
Shane’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanehegde/
Ari’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arieljrubin/
Air: https://air.inc/
Connect with Finn:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io
Some of my takeaways:
When you can’t afford to put media spend behind your creative, you’re forced to make something people actually want to watch organically. Use this constraint wisely
If you need to educate your CEO on why marketing matters, run.
The signal Ari looks for in a CEO that gets creative or values it: when you bring an idea, do they respond with “yes and how do we make it bigger? / where can it show up? / what if we did it like this? …” or with “let me think about it”?
Air splits their marketing org into three lanes:
- Content (run by Ari as Head of Content, basically their internal agency): community, brand, social, campaigns
- Marketing (run by Jeffrey Tousignant as Head of Marketing): lifecycle, conferences, product marketing
- Growth (currently hiring a Head of Growth - this is your chance): paid, AEO/SEO, GTM engineering, deep conversion
The interesting parts (to me):- They all sit on the same level and each report to the two co-founders. Usually the Head of Content would report into the Head of Marketing/CMO. Air doesn’t have a CMO.
- They each cover the full funnel. Even though the teams get scored differently (listen to the pod), the Content Team under Ari does not “just” do top of funnel, they also cover bottom of funnel with their community efforts. Same with Jeff with marketing.
My favorite quote from Ari: “We live in a world of takes now and everyone’s just offering takes. It’s easy to have ideas. Show me how you’re going to ship the fucking thing”
