Senior Social Media Manager at Motion

Howdy 🤠 -- I'm Trav!

I produce scroll-stopping digital content for technology companies.

Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's educational. And hot-dang, sometimes it's both!

I'm a creative marketing & communications professional with 8+ years of experience working in B2B SaaS. I work judiciously with in-house teams, creative vendors, freelancers, and agency partners to bring revenue-driving, community-building campaigns to life on LinkedIn & YouTube.

Travis Tyler

Do me a favor and follow AirOps if you're seeing this.

Because my new job is to now grow their socials.

Excited to see what we can do together Jessica Rosenberg!

And special thanks to Ryan Quindlen 🦇 and Connor Lewis 🎬 for helping connect me to this incredible opportunity.

Today is my last day Motion (Creative Analytics). 

And so we're retiring the "Ad Dad."

It's been a fun 2-year ride, but it's time for something new.

My wife said, "Aw but I love the Ad Dad"

I do too.

So much love and appreciation for the team who took a chance on me back in 2024. These humble Canadians are true ad tech nerds who just let me be me and celebrated my goofyness. Never trying to stifle me.

What a breath of fresh air it was for me to join after I had really struggled to be myself in my previous role.

Hoping whatever companies I end up at in the future will become Motion customers because the tool is a no-brainer for anyone who's serious about paid social and nothing even comes close.

More information on my next role coming soon (or you can DM me to find out sooner).

Today I turn 35.

And I want to use my day to promote sobriety, going to therapy, and getting on psych meds.

Some of us should be a little less worried about our engagement rates or our product launches and a little more about our untreated mental illness.

If you are sober curious I recommend checking out the Reframe app, the Sober Awkward podcast, and DMing me.

If you’re frustrated with a bad therapy experience I’m sorry about that. But there are some incredible ones out there, don’t give up on it yet.

Love you guys.

Keep going, you’re never as alone as you might feel.

PSA my baby isn’t going to smile at you because he does not know you. 

To him, you are a stranger to observe.

It’s not because he’s “shy” or “grumpy”.

I don’t smile at people that idk either. 

I nod. Maybe.

You wanna make him smile?

Give his dad a tech CEO who understands the power of brand marketing 

and do some peek a boo for cryin out loud

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the only way i survive my job

is by deleting every single social app from my phone on Friday at 5pm

and then re-downloading them monday morning

this stupid digital detox is my non-negotiable

I talk to 50+ B2B social media managers regularly.

Here's what they're seeing but won't say publicly:

Which one pisses you off the most?

2026 B2B SaaS marketing is going to make you mad.

In 2014, a therapist handed me this worksheet and I laughed in his face.

"It's called the wheel of life," he said.

"Uh ok" I replied.

But I shut up and did it anyway.

And then I realized it was actually pretty helpful for someone with a crippling amount of anxiety 

My all-or-nothing thinking made it feel like I was failing in all aspects of life.

The stupid chart showed me that I was actually flourishing in some areas.

And it helped me zero in on where to focus right now.

So I'm sharing it with all of you now just like I did with Alina Dallal from Oktopost during our podcast recording earlier this month.

Use it to map out 2026 both professionally and personally.

That is a much more effective way for setting up goals you want.

--

Give it a listen and maybe it'll help you too
https://lnkd.in/epECyAUQ

Can you guess which thumbnail won in this A/B/C test?

The results surprised me.

A = 37% watch time share
B= 18% watch time share
C= 44% watch time share

I thought for sure B would be the winner.

But no, it was me dressed up as a gold-miner made using Gemini 😂

AI slop ftw??

Keep testing my marketing friends!

ayo ElevenLabs 

can you build us a chrome extension/app or whatever where we can get decent voice narration for any article we come across on any website?

like for example,

i'm walking my son for 30 minutes in a stroller

I don't wanna be looking down reading this article the whole time

would love to have an elevenlabs voice to read the article to me over my airpods

Substack you gonna get in on this auto-narration or nah?

this hack for mining reddit for ad angle ideas is genius

⏰ TIMECODES ⏰
0:00 - Why Market Research Is Too Expensive & Slow
0:14 - Brennan Tobin's Free Reddit Workflow
0:43 - Step 1: Start with the Problem, Not the Product
1:26 - Using Reddit Answers Feature
1:54 - Step 2: Dive into Real Reddit Conversations
2:40 - Step 3: Build Your Quote, Emotion & Hook Database
3:12 - Step 4: Feed Your Database into Claude/ChatGPT
3:51 - Reviewing the AI-Generated Market Research
4:42 - Step 5: Turn Research into Ad Hooks & Briefs
5:23 - Final Result: 9 Ad Clusters Ready to Test


s/o Brennan Tobin and Konstantin Prodanovic this workflow is what AI is meant to do for marketers

B2B leaders will have $40M in VC 

But will cap their paid social budget at $15k a month to promote ebooks and demo requests

That is SUCH a huge problem.

And I’m looking around the b2b SaaS ecosystem like why tf is no one talking about this!?

For the last two years I’ve seen how the best in B2C run their paid social programs

Ngl it makes b2b just look embarrassing

And b2b has soooo much capital

Please make it make sense.

Someone drop this rant in a public slack channel at your company where your CFO and CEO hang out 

That way they can hear me SHOUTING IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS 

You need to be pushing $150k-$250k in meta ad spend per month or you should just pack it up and close up shop.

Your growth engine is stalling because you’re not investing serious resources or the right people to tackle it

Have your growth marketing team and brand team work together to launch 5 new ads each week (at a minimum) and constantly be testing new ideas new angles new visual formats

Put some got dang spend behind it

And go do this to promote your biggest tentpole moments of the year (should have at least one huge GTM moment each quarter)

Anthony Kennada

I’m a B2B marketer trapped in a B2C body. 

I’ve always believed that business brands should feel human. That conviction — that even in B2B, people crave stories, connection, and belonging — has been the red thread of my career.

I began my journey in Silicon Valley during a time of massive change, as software shifted from on-premise to the cloud. That shift gave me a front-row seat to transformation, but it was at Gainsight where the belief truly came alive. Joining as the first head of marketing, we didn’t just grow a company from zero to $100M+ ARR and a $1.1B acquisition — we helped create a category: Customer Success. And we did it by sparking a movement. Content, events, community — the tools of consumer marketing — became the foundation for a new kind of B2B brand. That experience led me to write Category Creation (Wiley, 2019), my attempt to capture in print what it takes to build not just a company, but a movement.

Since then, I’ve worn the CMO hat at Front and Hopin, and stepped into the founder’s seat with AudiencePlus. Those years taught me empathy for what it takes to build something from scratch and gave me an early glimpse into how AI would reshape the world of work and marketing.

Now, I believe we stand on the edge of an even greater shift: from cloud to intelligence. AI will automate the mechanics of marketing, but it cannot replicate what makes us human — authenticity, emotion, creativity, purpose, connection, belonging. I call this Brand Humanity™.

Goldenhour is my way of answering this moment. 

It’s the culmination of my life’s work — a company built to help founders, CMOs, and brands avoid the sea of sameness by embracing the one thing machines can’t imitate: us. Through media, services, and community, Goldenhour exists to make marketing human again.

Advisory Board Member

We are building software, content, and community to help every company become a media company.

Back in the arena, Philz in hand.

Who is around SF for coffee tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday?  I’m buying.

Helping B2B Founders & CMOs Unlock Brand Humanity® | Built Gainsight into a $1B+ Brand | Author of Category Creation | 3x Cloud 100 CMO

It’s hard to imagine a better modern case study of a mature SaaS company going all in on AI than what Intercom has done with Fin.

On April 10, 2024, Intercom hosted Built For You - an event that debuted a fundamentally new vision for the company. It wasn’t incremental. It was an about-face.

A founder back in the driver’s seat.
A clear, confident narrative.
A strong product demo.
And a level of production quality that signaled conviction, not experimentation.

It felt like their lightning-strike moment.

Over the last year, as I’ve worked with founders and leadership teams on repositioning their brands for this new AI era, Intercom has come up again and again as the model for how to do this well. 

Tomorrow, I’m hosting a live conversation with the person behind much of that transformation: Paul Adams, CPO and CMO at Intercom.

If you’re a founder, CMO, or operator trying to understand what it actually takes to pivot (and lead) in this moment, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

I’ll share the link in the comments once the algorithm allows, or you can head to my profile to register.

Hope you’ll join us.

We’re investing trillions in AI. Almost nothing in the humans using it.

Over the last few years, AI has moved from experiment to infrastructure.
Capital, attention, and ambition are flowing fast.

But beneath the headlines, more than 1 billion knowledge workers are living with growing uncertainty about relevance, identity, and long-term value.

What’s interesting is what’s happening in parallel:

Wellness is becoming a structural priority, not a perk
Offline experiences are resurging
Gen Z is signaling that wellbeing is non-negotiable

I believe 2026 marks an inflection point—when the “Intelligence Class” begins to invest intentionally in the human capacity required to work with AI, not just compete against it.

I wrote a longer piece exploring this shift here.

The 2026 AI Prediction No One is Talking About F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a 1936 essay titled “The Crack-Up” that “the test of a first-rate intellig

Open article: We’re Investing Trillions in AI. Almost Nothing in the Humans Using It. by Anthony Kennada • 5 min read

We’re Investing Trillions in AI. Almost Nothing in the Humans Using It.

Marketing isn’t being disrupted by better slogans. It’s being disrupted by better products.

I’m hosting a live conversation this Thursday with Paul Adams, CPO & Interim CMO at Intercom, on what marketing becomes in an AI-native world.

Paul sits in a rare seat owning both Product and Marketing at a company that went all-in early with Fin.ai. He’s helped guide Intercom’s evolution from a classic SaaS company into an AI one, and has some of the clearest thinking I’ve seen on where the CMO role is heading next.

We’ll talk about:

- Why Product + Marketing leadership is converging
- The conviction behind launching Fin early (and publicly)
- Founder-led storytelling in the AI era
- Whether AI agents should be named—and feel human
- What CMOs need to unlearn to stay relevant
- Why clarity beats cleverness (again)

If you’re a founder, CMO, or operator trying to build something real in the AI era—not just chase the hype—this one’s for you.

The Future of Marketing in an AI-Native World

I’ve died on this hill more times than I can count.

As a CMO, I knew brand mattered. I believed it was the moat.

I still do.

But when revenue pressure hit — brand was always the hardest thing to defend in the room.

New data just published makes that tension painfully clear:

💸 ~70% of marketing budget still goes to demand
💸 When budgets get cut, 55% protect demand — only 11% protect brand
💸 And yet 73% of CMOs say brand makes demand more efficient

So why does brand STILL lose?

Because most of us can’t prove it in a pipeline meeting.

That’s why I’m excited to host a conversation with Bill Macaitis (former CMO of Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce), who led the research behind a study of 168 B2B CMOs.

This won’t be theory or brand philosophy. 

It’s a CMO-to-CMO conversation about what the data actually says, where brand arguments fall apart and what you can practically do about it before your next budget cycle.

If you’ve ever felt the tension between what you know works and what you’re allowed to fund — join us.

Brand Is the Moat — So Why Does Demand Get the Budget?

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The Battle

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Anthony Kennada

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Travis Tyler's LinkedIn Performance

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