In partnership with

Hello and welcome back to Fresh Salmon, your go-to B2B marketing newsletter. This is 184th edition of Fresh Salmon.

This week we’re diving into a topic that sits right at the intersection of media, audience building, and AI: How AI is changing not just how we create content, but how audiences are built, owned, and scaled.

Most companies are still experimenting with AI as a productivity tool.

But the real opportunity?

AI as an accelerator of audience-building media strategies.

Meet our primary partner for today’s edition: Synthflow. Check them out 👇

Your Secure Voice AI Deployment Playbook

• Meet HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2 standards

• Route calls securely across 100+ locations

• Launch enterprise-grade agents in just weeks

Download The Free Guide

From Content Explosion to Context Wars

Let’s start with the obvious: AI has made it trivial to create content. Blog posts, LinkedIn carousels, even video scripts can be generated in minutes. That means the old bottleneck of “we don’t have enough content” is gone.

But abundance creates a new scarcity: context.

When everyone can generate 100 posts a day, what cuts through is no longer volume. It’s:

• Your lived expertise

• Your unique point of view

• Your ability to show up with consistency in a way that AI alone can’t replicate

That’s why brands that treat AI as a replacement for voice will drown in sameness. Brands that treat AI as a force multiplier for their clarity and creativity will win.

Media First, AI Powered

For the past few years, we’ve been talking about the shift to a media-first mindset: act like a publisher, not just a marketer. That means episodic content, multi-channel distribution, and consistent storytelling.

Now add AI to that mix. What happens?

• Faster Production: AI handles first drafts, video editing cues, clip suggestions, thumbnail variations.

• Smarter Distribution: AI analyzes when your audience engages most, what hooks resonate, and how to tweak content per channel.

• Deeper Personalization: AI can help tailor content streams for different audience segments, delivering a Netflix-like experience for B2B thought leadership.

Instead of replacing the human-led media engine, AI becomes the infrastructure that keeps it running 10x more efficiently.

Meet our secondary partner for today’s edition: guidde. Check them out 👇👇

Create How-to Videos in Seconds with AI

Stop wasting time on repetitive explanations. Guidde’s AI creates stunning video guides in seconds—11x faster.

• Turn boring docs into visual masterpieces

• Save hours with AI-powered automation

• Share or embed your guide anywhere

How it works: Click capture on the browser extension, and Guidde auto-generates step-by-step video guides with visuals, voiceover, and a call to action.

Best part? It’s 100% free.

👉 Download the extension now

The AI Audience Flywheel

Here’s where things get interesting.

Traditional marketing funnels look like this: Attention → Trust → Customer.
But in an AI-augmented, media-first world, the funnel starts to look more like a flywheel:

1. Short-form for Attention

   • Clips, posts, carousels. AI can help script, edit, and test dozens of variations.

   • The job isn’t just to get clicks, it’s to pull people into your world.

2. Long-form for Trust

   • Podcasts, videos, newsletters. AI helps transcribe, repurpose, and optimize for search/discovery.

   • This is where real expertise and authentic voice matter. AI makes distribution scalable, but the substance has to be yours.

3. Owned Media for Retention

   • Email lists, communities, private feeds. AI can personalize at scale, segment intelligently, and automate engagement.

   • This ensures audiences stay in your orbit, not the platform’s.

4. Feedback Loops for Growth

   • Every clip, every post, every interaction generates data. AI interprets it faster than any team could.

   • That feedback sharpens the next round of content, making your media engine smarter with each cycle.

The result?

Instead of pushing people down a funnel, you’re pulling them into a self-reinforcing ecosystem - one that compounds in strength the longer you run it.

Examples of AI + Media in Action

• Morning Brew: Their writers increasingly use AI for topic generation and drafting, freeing time to focus on angles and tone. The result is more Brew-style voice, not less.

• HubSpot: They’re leaning into AI-powered insights to refine inbound marketing, essentially building personalization at scale while keeping the human voice at the front.

• Creators on LinkedIn: The fastest-growing ones are using AI to batch ideas, draft frameworks, and then layer in their own personal stories. It lets them stay consistent without burning out.

The common thread: AI does the heavy lifting. Humans provide the clarity, story, and spark.

A Word of Caution: Don’t Automate Yourself Into Irrelevance

AI can make distribution seamless, but it can’t replace authenticity. If your audience feels like every post is templated, every reply is auto-generated, and every idea is generic… you’ve lost them.

Propaganda campaigns in history (like Torches of Freedom or Doctors and Camels) remind us what happens when messaging is manipulative or hollow: short-term wins, long-term trust collapse.

The same principle applies now. Don’t use AI to mimic connection. Use it to amplify it.

Meet our secondary partner for today’s edition: AdQuick. Check them out 👇👇

Modernize Out Of Home with AdQuick

AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers and creatives with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.

You can learn more at www.AdQuick.com

How B2B Founders Should Approach This

1. Start With the Show
   Anchor your strategy in episodic content (podcast, video series, newsletter). Make AI the engine that repurposes and distributes, not the showrunner.

2. Layer the Formats
   Use AI to break down long-form into dozens of clips. Short form gets attention, long form builds trust, owned channels convert.

3. Measure Movement, Not Just Metrics
   AI can spit out CTRs and open rates. But the real question: are you building a movement your audience wants to belong to?

4. Stay Human-Led
   Your voice, your conviction, your lived experience, that’s the differentiator AI can’t replicate.

The Key Takeaways:

• Marketing campaigns will fade. Movements compound.

• AI is not the movement - it’s the accelerant.

• Audience building is still about attention → trust → belonging. AI just makes the system faster, smarter, and infinitely scalable.

The future of growth sits right at this intersection: media-first strategies, powered by AI, building audiences that last.

Interesting Thing That I Noticed This Week

LinkedIn is really going after “Comment Visibility”. They want to reward visibility when you comment on someone else’s posts. The exchange creates engagement on the platform, and serves the purpose in a true sense for a social media platform.

Interestingly, one of my comments recently receive over 57,000 impressions!!

Isn’t that insane?

That’s it for this week! If you found this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend.

See you next time!

Do what is good for your soul ❤️

All the best,

Vivek

PS. Whenever you are ready, here are 3 ways in which I can help you and your business:

#1: B2B Marketing Consulting and Go-To-Market Advisory for your business.

#2: 1-on-1 Personal Coaching and Mentoring on anything related to Marketing and Go-To-Market Strategies for you.

#3: Promoting you or your brand via this newsletter.

For any of these things just shoot me a reply, and we will arrange a time to chat.