Episode #234: Dave Steer on repositioning a brand around AI in three months

Webflow's CMO had 90 days to relaunch the website, reposition the brand, and ship an ad campaign.
For marketing leaders whose board just told them to become AI native, and who don't have a playbook for it.

Dave Steer is CMO at Webflow, leading brand, demand, and product marketing after two decades at GitLab, Cloudflare, Twitter, Facebook, and Mozilla. His mandate came from the board and leadership team, timed to Webflow Conf three months from his start date. We cover how he reorganized a 50-to-60-person marketing team around AI tools, why he ran positioning as an executive exercise with April Dunford rather than a marketing one, and where he draws the line between what a human writes and what an agent touches. He also walks through Webflow's AEO Maturity Index, a study of 2,000 US websites where the average site scored about two or three, and where the problem was site structure rather than content volume.

What you'll hear

• Why positioning is a corporate strategy activity, not a marketing activity, and who has to be in the room
• How the team moved from a relay race of specialists to treating everyone as an orchestrator and connector
• The two instincts that go wrong first: buying a pile of ChatGPT licenses, and optimizing for day one instead of day two
• Where the human/agent line sits: the human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation

Chapters

• 00:00 - The human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation
• 00:33 - Three ways marketing leaders are handling the AI mandate badly
• 02:24 - The three things every CMO has to be expert in now
• 03:11 - Where the three-month mandate came from
• 05:00 - What "agentic" means when the web has two audiences
• 06:14 - April Dunford and why positioning is an executive staff exercise
• 07:13 - The AEO Maturity Index: 2,000 sites, average score of two or three
• 08:40 - Rebuilt, not retooled: ending the relay race
• 12:26 - Four human roles: strategist, orchestrator, creator, connector
• 17:13 - The single biggest mistake CMOs are making right now
• 18:55 - Lightning round
• 20:49 - Top three takeaways and one thing to do this week

Links & resources

Guest

Dave Steer, Chief Marketing Officer, Webflow
Website
Webflow Conf
LinkedIn

About Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow. Real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

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