Todd Clouser 🧙‍♂️💜

I learned content growing a YouTube channel from 0 - 10M+ monthly views.
I learned social by building an audience of over 1M followers across channels.
I learned community growing two Facebook groups to 12k+ monthly active users.
I learned influencer marketing building a team of 15+ creators that drove millions in DTC revenue.


Now I help B2B companies incorporate those strategies and tactics to build their own marketing machine.

DM me to chat.

Party Wizard

https://qrco.de/be1MOp

Todd Clouser

Things I want to see more (and less) of on LinkedIn this year:

MORE:
- detailed playbooks on small experiments that you've run with real numbers/results (wins and losses)

- entertainment connected to messaging and povs (not just product)

- community -- at one point LI felt like a big community, now it feels like ground zero for the dead internet theory

- collabs -- speaking of community, we used to collab for the fun of it and to see how audiences reacted. Nowadays pretty much any collab comes with a dollar sign.

*personal one* - a return of cheat codes (Obaid?)


LESS:

- 'hooks' -- we've glorified clickbait as 'good hooks'. I'm so tired of reading/watching content where every sentence is a tease to the next sentence. Yes, I understand that you want me to get to the end, but once upon a time we did that with good content instead of holding value hostage with every freakin sentence.

- AI generated content -- probably gunna get hate for this one, but i don't agree with the 'typing my thoughts into ChatGT and then refining the output is not the same as ai-generated content' argument. feel free to disagree, but (in my opinion) ChatGPT is a crutch and makes you far less creative the more you use it and LI far less enjoyable.

- AI comments -- 18 months ago (when AI was more obvious) we all pointed and laughed at the ai comments. Now that AI is good (and harder to spot) everyone has adopted ai comments.  **see community bullet above**

What do you want to see more/less of here this year?

Shout to Jen Allen-Knuth for prompting the idea for this post.

Tech hub people be ravin on rooftops and shit in their "day in the life".

I haven't shaved in a month and just kinda move throughout my house a lot.

Anyone else?

AJ Eckstein

Sales Strategy Analyst ($XXB Tech/Media Client)

Founder @ Creator Match 🧩 Scaling Creator Marketing for B2B, SaaS, & AI Brands | Fast Company Journalist | LinkedIn Learning Instructor (150K+ students) | TEDx & Keynote Speaker

Founder @ Creator Match 🧩 #1 tech-enabled agency building & scaling Creator programs for B2B/SaaS/AI Brands.

We are trusted by the world’s most innovative tech Brands (i.e. Anthropic/Claude, Notion, Zapier, HubSpot, Teachable, Wix, beehiiv, BetterHelp, Framer, and more), as well as the most influential B2B Creators.

[Creator Match Services]
→ Tech-enabled brand-side agency (done-for-you service): We run some of the largest and most creative B2B  Creator campaigns in the world, handling end-to-end strategy to execution.

[Our Story]
This journey started as a LinkedIn Creator struggling to monetize. I was laughed at in creator communities as no one took LinkedIn seriously. But I realized I wasn’t alone as I found a community of underserved, underpaid, and underappreciated LinkedIn Creators just like me (and maybe just like YOU).

So I did what any rational person would do. 

I quit my comfortable Fortune 500 management consulting job to go all-in on solving this pain point! And then Creator Match was born!

I’m on a mission to help Brands crush results with innovative campaigns and get B2B Creators PAID!

**For Brands/Agencies/Creators 👉 Get matched at creatormatch.com**

Outside of being a busy Founder, I also:
📰 Write for Fast Company (work/life section)
🎤 Speak at events/conferences around the world
🚀 Launched 3 LinkedIn Learning Courses (150,000+ learners)
🌎 Travel and explore: surfing, snowboarding, mountain biking
🥇 Compete in endurance sports (Marathons, Ultramarathons, Triathlons)

Follow me for daily content on being a young founder (building in public), LinkedIn growth and monetization tips, brand deals, B2B creator/influencer marketing strategies, and more.

Message me if you’d like to chat about Creator Match (Brands & Creators), speaking at your event/conference, and sponsorship opportunities.

Founder

- We are the go-to career platform to knock out the competition and advance past the final round interview.
- Learn from Recruiters, Hiring Managers, and Career Experts.

AJ Eckstein 🧩

i just flew 7,400 miles to Tel Aviv to grab beers with influencer marketing managers from Wix, Riverside, Monday, Fiverr, and other brands.

Why?

The best influencer marketing deals don’t happen in your inbox.
They happen over coffee (and beer), in cities most people aren’t willing to fly to.

For context, Sarah Adam has been calling me out for not coming back to Israel sooner. It’s been several years, and she was absolutely right. What really stood out this time wasn’t just the meetings, it was how fast the tech scene here is moving.

I also kept running into familiar faces everywhere as we just met up at Semrush Spotlight Amsterdam, Make with Notion San Francisco, and 1 Billion Follower Summit in Dubai.

The happy hour was a mix of current brand partners and creators, as well as new intros. Some awesome friends like like Ruben Hassid, Yonathan Cohen, Shlomo Genchin, Lisa Harroy, Lior Taubenblatt, Brandon Pourmorady, & Apple.

After the marketers happy hour, we grabbed dinner with some absolute legends in the space like Benjamin Douablin, Thomas Rebaud, Noam Nisand, & Maya Caspi.

Here’s what actually came up across those chats:
- How brands are thinking about scaling creator marketing as competition is heating up 
- Why certain B2B brands are expanding beyond LinkedIn
- The crazy world of rates with AI Creators
- And so much more

Most marketers stay comfortable in their home market. Meanwhile, ecosystems like Tel Aviv are quietly building some of the most sophisticated creator programs out there.

Influencer marketing is global. The relationships are global. And your mindset has to be global too.

Alright, Sarah was right. Where should I fly next? 

✈️ Currently on a flight back to Dubai eating the best chicken shawarma sandwich...

***
🔔 Follow me AJ Eckstein 🧩 for more content on entrepreneurship, B2B Creator Marketing, and Brand strategies

Creator Marketing for Tech Brands | Founder @ Creator Match 🧩 | Fast Company Journalist | LinkedIn Learning Instructor (200K+ students) | TEDx & Keynote Speaker

this $4 billion tech company forced its employees to dress up like superheroes in a school play… for an AI product launch?

ClickUp just launched Super Agents, and instead of another boring AI campaign, they shipped something actually worth studying.

As the founder Zeb Evans put it, Super Agents are automatically personalized to you and your company using proprietary, state of the art agent architecture, orchestration, and tooling.

While the product launch is cool, the GTM was even more genius. 

They ran 4 different GTM motions at once. Here's the breakdown you'll want to save for your next campaign:

#4 – The AI hype video
At this point, these are table stakes. 

There is so much AI noise that animated explainers are the fastest way to communicate features and use cases without asking too much from the viewer. 

#3 – Product Hunt launch
Reminder that ClickUp is a $4B company doing $200M+ in ARR. And yet, they still launch like a scrappy startup.

Name another billion dollar company that treats Product Hunt like it matters. They still care deeply about user feedback and community momentum.

#2 – Employee Generated Content (EGC), done right
Their Head of Marketing, Chris Cunningham, shared that 15 ClickUp employees actively create content on LinkedIn. Five of them have 20K+ followers.

These are not company branded ads.
They are personal brands building trust, with distribution baked in.
This is EGC at scale, without killing authenticity.

#1 – The LinkedIn headshot switch
This one is my favorite. You do not realize how often you see someone’s headshot until it changes. It is part of their brand. The second it updates, your brain pauses.

Think Notion Faces.
Think Veed’s NYC billboard campaign.

Low lift.
High pattern interrupt.

This is why I love studying campaigns like this.
It makes you stop and say, wait… that’s B2B?

Welcome back to my series, B2B Campaigns in the Wild! 

💬 Did you notice the headshot changes for this launch?

Kudos to the ClickUp team for this marketing masterclass!

***
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Breaking: 16 Marketers from the world's largest tech brands get stranded underground in a NYC wine cellar due to the crazy snow storm...

I flew from Austin to NYC for a couple very last-minute events: speaking on a panel at the LinkedIn office, delivering a keynote at Creator Economy NYC, and hosting a mini team off-site with 4 of our Creator Match 🧩 East Coast team members.

I've been couch surfing all week, completely exhausted, filming content with Creator friends, and squeezing in lunch at the Duolingo and Notion offices. 

While I was already there, we figured - why not throw together a Marketer's dinner? 

We had 15 hours to pull it off. FIFTEEN HOURS. Right as the worst snowstorm in New York history was about to hit. Keep in mind restaurants were closed during the storm so we had to book the same day as the event.

I even paid some random guy off the street $350 to mock up a chalkboard that would be a cool backdrop for the dinner. 

Guests from Notion, LinkedIn, Airtable, Fiverr, Air, and Teachable all battled through the snow to get there.

My hot take: Agencies like ours are supposed to be the glue between brands and creators. But there's this weird gap nobody talks about - marketers working in-house almost never meet each other. They're not encouraged to. They don't go out of their way to do it... So we do it for them.

People are craving IRL right now. There's so much value in being the person or event that was the reason why somebody met - and that's become one of our core initiatives.

Similar to the creator campaigns we run for tech brands, we're always thinking of new, unique ways to do things differently. We're done with boring corporate dinners. How can we make it fun, exciting, and unique?

That's the whole point of these dinners. Get the smartest people in influencer, social, and brand marketing in a room together. Let them actually talk. Share what's working, what's not, and compare notes on this wild industry we're all building. Plus, bring in platform partners like leaders from LinkedIn!!

If you've ever been to a Creator Match dinner, you know these are NOT your typical networking events. They're wayyyy too much fun. Half our guests request PTO the next day (sry not sry lol).

And apparently, they're memorable enough that people will brave a historic blizzard to show up.

🌎 What's next on the CM world tour? Heading to San Francisco next week to help one of our brand partners activate at the Super Bowl.

Did you get hit with the snow storm? Take me back to 70 and sunny.

***
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Everyone says ‘don’t post on weekends'. Here’s why that advice is dead wrong.

Yes, fewer people are online on Saturdays and Sundays.

But there are also far fewer people posting.
And that’s the part everyone ignores.

Less noise means more attention.
More attention means higher odds your post actually gets seen.

Weekends are when I experiment the most, especially with video. Some of my strongest reach has come from posts published on a Saturday or Sunday.

The audience also feels different:
→ Builders
→ Side hustlers
→ People leveling up their 9-5s

The comments are better
The conversations go deeper
The engagement feels intentional, not reactive

Weekends on LinkedIn aren’t dead. They’re just quieter, and that’s the opportunity.

TLDR:
Test everything yourself.
Stop blindly following social media rules.
Sometimes the quietest days are where the biggest opportunity lives.

💬 Have you ever posted on a weekend?

***
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we're hiring a cracked 17 year old who lives on Red Bull, ships at 3am, and wants to join our “family” on this rocket ship...

JK - But if that sounded painfully familiar, you’ve probably read way too many startup job descriptions lol.

Here’s the honest version:

Creator Match 🧩 IS HIRING AGAIN. AND THIS TIME, A SENIOR-LEVEL ROLE → HEAD OF CLIENT SERVICES.

We're growing faster than we can keep up, which is exciting, and also a little chaotic. More clients, bigger budgets, higher expectations, and more ways things can break. 

After a scrappy and successful first year, we're entering our next chapter: scaling intentionally and expanding our capabilities. This role is a critical senior leadership hire as we move from momentum to maturity, building the infrastructure to scale our Client Services team from a dozen to 30+ people while maintaining the exceptional service quality our clients expect.

You'll report directly to the COO and CEO.

As a brand-side agency, we are trusted by the world's most innovative Tech/B2B/SaaS/AI Brands (i.e. Anthropic/Claude, HubSpot, Notion, Fiverr, Teachable, Framer, Airtable, Zapier, Gusto, and more), as well as the most influential Creators.

So we’re hiring someone to fully own client delivery. Not “support” it, not “oversee” it, actually own it. You'll directly manage our full Client Services team.

Important culture note: this is not a "chill" job. We move fast, hop fences, and break things. We expect people to act like owners. Everyone here is A-Team and we do not settle for mediocrity. You must be someone that runs TO chaos, not FROM it. 

📌 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/dkmGcpq4

💬 This is our most pivotal leadership hire to date. Is that person you (or someone you know? Leave a comment or tag that person below!!

***
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Image creds: Brandon

i manage multi-million dollar creator budgets for the world's largest tech brands.

Here's what's actually changing in 2026 (you'll want to save this and Slack it to your team).

I partner with CMOs and top creators in B2B, SaaS, and AI every week through Creator Match 🧩. After analyzing where millions $$$ are flowing and which strategies are actually printing money, here are the shifts separating winners from losers.

Brands covered: Anthropic/Claude, Notion, Wispr Flow, Teachable, ClickUp, Zapier, Descript, Gamma, Granola, Sprout Social, Clay, Airwallex

Biggest trends for 2026:

The Death of Playing Small

B2B brands are finally acting like consumer brands. The boring playbook is dead. If you're not making people stop scrolling, you're invisible.

IRL Is the New Performance Channel

Events, dinners, and experiences are outperforming paid ads. Community beats CPMs. Real relationships drive real revenue.

LinkedIn Finally Figured It Out

Thought Leader ads are printing money. Personal brands are becoming distribution engines. Your employees are your media team now; employee advocacy isn't optional anymore.

The Creator Economy Goes Pro

Gifting programs are entering B2B (yes, really). Brands are building creator rosters like Nike builds athlete rosters. Fewer creators, bigger checks, longer partnerships. 

Content That Actually Works

Long-form YouTube is a serious B2B channel now. UGC and ambassador programs are scaling fast. Use-case stories beat feature lists every single time. Data-driven storytelling is the new white paper.

The Contrarian Moves

Activations are getting weirder and louder. AI companies are marketing away from the word "AI". International GTM outside the US is moving from "phase 2" to "day 1".

Whether you're a marketer or a creator, the ones winning right now are treating this like a creative sport, not a checklist.

👇 See the full trends breakdown in the carousel below 

💬 Creators & Brands, what are you seeing for 2026?

PS - My social team said I was CRAZY to give this resource away for free. But we believe in un-gatekeeping ;) 

***
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Tech Marketing Trends Report for 2026 (B2B, SaaS, AI)

The jobs that look easiest are usually the hardest.

I just got back to Austin, TX after emceeing 3 days of programming on stage in Dubai with 24 hours behind the mic at the world’s largest creator economy conference with 30,000 attendees.

Aside from being aggressively jet lagged and forgetting my apartment number (been on the road for the last 2 months lol), I found my favorite photo from the event.

It wasn’t a professional speaking shot on stage.

It was the messy pile of handwritten cue cards from hours of prep and zero sleep.

Emceeing looks simple: Read names. Smile. Keep things moving.

What you don’t see is everything that happens before the microphone turns on.

Here’s what it actually takes:
• Keeping a complex program on schedule
• Resetting room energy and pacing in real time
• Managing open Q/A without losing momentum or control
• Turning standalone talks into a cohesive, multi day narrative
• Preparing and managing every speaker touchpoint pre stage
• Ensuring live audio, timing, and transitions with zero margin for error
• Studying every speaker, company, and topic so nothing is improvised
• Representing partners like Binance on stage while maintaining credibility
• Communicating live housekeeping updates to support organizers and production
• Making sure speakers had everything they needed, including tracking down a lost suitcase mid conference (s/o Taz Patel)

And the biggest one: Knowing the industry inside and out, the speakers, their companies, and the major moments shaping the creator economy space. 

Oh and also checking in with our amazing Creator Match 🧩 team to ensure our creator marketing campaigns with our tech brands were running smoothly (s/o Tara Knight 🧩 with some fun 11 PM and 5 AM calls lol).

The work behind the microphone is easily 10x what you see on stage.
The visible part is maybe 10 percent.

And this isn’t just emceeing.

It’s social media. People think it’s just posting.
It’s influencer marketing. People think it’s just paying creators.
And so many other roles!!

When something feels effortless, someone is carrying weight you never see.

I’ve grown to respect the invisible roles the most.
They’re usually the ones holding everything together.

💬 What’s something that looks effortless, but you know takes serious skill behind the scenes?

***
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24 hour day with two 7-figure creative founders

Starting at 7 AM...

With special guest Zack Honarvar

Dude is a machine - check out this resume:
→ Founder/CEO @ Good Internet 
→ Co-Founder & Advisor @ Fan of a Fan
→ Co-Founder & Advisor @ Boring Stuff
→ Talent Manager to Airrack & Yes Theory
→ Co-Founder/CEO @ Good Story Studios
→ Co-Founder & CEO (Acquired) @ Creator Now

If you ever wanted to follow MR Creator Economy, Zack is THAT guy. 

💬 Whose schedule do you think is closer to yours, Zack’s or mine?

Filmed at the Lighthouse in Venice

(This is another edition of my Founder Series, who should I collab with next? Tag them below!!)

***
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The Office isn't just a TV show anymore. It's a viral B2B marketing strategy.

Gamma hired Dwight Schrute as their CEO.
Ramp hired Kevin Malone as their CFO.
Both went viral.
And it's destroying traditional marketing campaigns.

October 2025: Ramp put Kevin Malone in a glass box in Times Square...
Processing expense reports live for 7 hours.
Millions of views.
Thousands showed up in person.
Finance software became must-watch content.

January 2026: Gamma let Dwight Shrute storm into their office.
Fires the CEO.
Mocks PowerPoint.
Sits at the desk and declares himself the new CEO of Gamma.
The joke was the product demo.

This is "nostalgia marketing."

And it's working because the smartest tech brands (b2b/saas/ai) figured something out:
→ Stop treating marketing like a cost center.
→ Start treating pop culture like a growth channel.

The Office isn't just entertainment; it's office culture. Every boring meeting. Every awkward expense report. Every corporate moment we've all survived.

When Gamma and Ramp used these characters, they didn't interrupt culture.
They became it.

The new playbook:
→ Stop making ads. Make moments.
→ Stop testing creators for 30 days. Commit longterm.
→ Stop being professional. Be human.

The brands winning aren't the loudest. They're the most culturally fluent.

💬 Do you also watch The Office?
💬 What nostalgic IP could your brand use to hijack the conversation?

Kudos to both teams (ie Kristin Grant Nathan) for crushing this campaign 

***
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new co-working location unlocked: the largest surfing 🏄‍♂️ wave pool in the world (built by Kelly Slater in Abu Dhabi).

Picture this: taking a Zoom call with the fastest growing billion-dollar AI brand while six-foot artificial waves crash every 90 seconds behind you. Surfers practicing their bottom turns while you’re drafting campaign briefs, tweaking creator drafts, and building brand strategy decks.

Sounds ridiculous? Maybe. But it actually captures what remote work looks like when it’s done right.

Our team is now 20+ people, building and scaling creator programs for leading tech brands. And this team is spread across time zones around the world (since our brand partners are global as well). 

Which means some days I’m surfing early, then working until 3am to overlap with clients, creators, and teammates globally.

I hear this time and time again from leaders: “I don’t let my team work remotely because people slack off.”

That's a bad take. If someone is underperforming, the issue usually isn’t remote work.

It’s more often:
→ Lack of ownership or clarity
→ Hiring without a clear bar
→ Leadership gaps

The truth: 98% of employees want at least some form of remote work for a reason.

Companies like Creator Match 🧩 are proud to operate 100% remotely, with distributed teams executing global campaigns every day. And yes, I heard they're hiring.

The future of work isn’t where you sit. It’s what you deliver. 
And winning teams are optimizing for output, not optics.

Remote work doesn’t make people lazy. Bad systems do.

💬 Where do you land on remote work?

***
🔔 Follow me AJ Eckstein 🧩 for more content on entrepreneurship, B2B Creator Marketing, and Brand strategies

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