9 Nov · 20 min

There's So Much AI Out There That the Only Thing People Believe Is Social Proof | Cletus McKeown

Cletus McKeown (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cletusmckeown/), SVP of Growth and Marketing at Bridge (https://www.bridge.co/), joins Marketers of Technology to explain how he moved from Comedy Central and Flowcode into marketing a business-lending platform for hotel owners and consumer brands. Cletus shares why legacy channels and social proof beat trendy thought leadership in a category where CFOs can tell if you don't know the subject, how he built a GitHub-based, AI-centric website that publishes content at scale, how a custom set of intent signals powers speed-to-lead, and why he wants two real wild-card experiments every year. Topics Discussed: - Cletus's path from Comedy Central and ad agencies to Flowcode, freelancing and Bridge - What Bridge does: business lending, with a focus on hotels and consumer brands on retail shelves, plus corporate financing partnerships - Marketing financial products to CFOs and having Bridge's capital team review his content - Why legacy channels like newsletters and retargeting work in a traditional category - Why social proof and case studies matter more than thought-leader content in the age of AI - Winning in agentic search where links, not just brand mentions, drive attributable traffic - Building an AI-centric website with a GitHub repository, Cursor and Vercel instead of WordPress or Webflow - Producing close to 300 articles a month using AI research on content gaps and what ranks - Hub-and-spoke content across many channels, with AI helping decide what to create - Using AI for inbox triage and drafts, while keeping human taste - Lessons from Comedy Central: having a point of view and picking a lane - Building roughly 75 custom external signals that trigger Teams alerts and 24-hour speed-to-lead - Giving new channels 90 days and tracking depth in the financing funnel, not lead volume - Planning two stretch experiments by year end GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons: - Social proof is the thing people still believe. With AI content everywhere, Cletus says case studies showing how you actually helped customers outperform generic thought leadership, and leaning into them lifted his top of funnel. - Legacy channels can fit legacy products. Money is a traditional product, so newsletters, retargeting and social proof worked better for Bridge than trendy formats. - Have an expert check your work. Moving from SaaS to lending, Cletus still has Bridge's head of capital or a founder review content so the brand never sounds like it doesn't know banking. - Win agentic search with links, not just mentions. A brand recommendation without a link doesn't produce attributable transactions, so Cletus tracks which content earns links in AI answers. - Let marketers ship from a repository. Cletus asked an engineer to explain GitHub, then built a repo with brand guidelines and examples. He types a request into Cursor, tweaks the output and pushes it live on Vercel. - Build signals only your ICP would know. Cletus created about 75 custom signals, such as Meta ads, investor news and partnerships, scraped daily. When a fit brand shows an intent signal, sales gets an alert and if no one acts within 24 hours it flows into automated outreach. - Be contrarian or be forgettable. A comedian once told Cletus, if no one's offended, what's the point? He applies it to brands: pick a lane and say something. - Give channels 90 days and measure depth. Cletus judges channels by how far leads move down the financing process, not by volume, because a channel can produce a lot of junk. // Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service