Most marketing teams are measuring the wrong thing with AI. They're tracking speed. How many blog posts they wrote. How fast they shipped. How many tools they're using. And because those numbers go up, it feels like progress.
Whitney Goldstein, Director of Marketing at Gorilla Logic, isn't buying it. She told her team to stop optimizing for speed and start asking a harder question: does it actually work better?
Goldstein has stepped into new marketing leadership roles more than once, and she's developed a clear philosophy for how to start. She's direct with her team from day one about why she's there and what direction they're heading, even when that direction is still taking shape. She meets with every team member individually to understand what they like, what they don't, and where they want to go in their careers. Even when she doesn't have authority to make big changes, she looks for what she can shift.
The biggest mistakes she's seen leaders make, including herself, come down to pace:
The right call depends on the organization, its history, and how much change the team has already absorbed. "You have to be really cognizant and respectful of the team members that have gone through those," she told Paxton Gray on The Campaign.
Gorilla Logic is a software engineering firm. For a marketing team to do its job well, it has to understand deeply technical work and talk about it with credibility. That gap is hard to close from a distance.
Goldstein's approach is to close it head-on. She has her marketing team learn the technical pitches and practice delivering them internally. Not because anyone on the marketing team will ever sit in a real client meeting, but because it signals something important to the engineering teams. It shows that marketing is invested enough to do the hard work of understanding the product. "Showing that we're invested enough to be able to do it ourselves and raise our hand in front of a group of people and say, 'We're going to show what we've got. And if it's not right, we're happy to take critiques and feedback' — I think it's really shown that the marketing team is invested in what we're doing."
That willingness to be vulnerable builds trust faster than any cross-functional meeting. When that trust exists, things move. When it breaks, no process or tool will save you.
When competitors started launching AI agents and token-based subscriptions, Gorilla Logic made a deliberate choice to go the other direction. The pitch isn't a new platform or a new product. It's the same thing Gorilla Logic has always done: build digital products and platforms for clients. The methodology has changed, the tools have changed, but the fundamental value hasn't.
Their two AI-related offerings reflect this:
At the end of an engagement, clients own what was built. They're not locked into a subscription or dependent on another platform. "We're not pushing another subscription. It's not another thing that they're locked into. It is still our expertise at the end of the day that we are delivering to them," Goldstein said.
The market response has been mixed, as it often is when a category shifts and uncertainty sets in. But the buyers who do respond are clear about why: they're tired of being sold tools. And internally, the contrarian stance has given her team something to rally around. When a team believes in what they're saying and knows it's different from everything else in the market, they show up with real energy.
When Goldstein joined Gorilla Logic, every department was expected to use AI and report on how. The results, across the board, were thin. She points to research showing 95% of AI projects fail to produce measurable outcomes. Her team is behind on adoption. That's intentional.
The trap most teams fall into is treating efficiency as the goal. AI can produce content faster, so teams optimize for volume and speed. But faster output with no business impact isn't a win. And in many cases, the time savings aren't even real.
The efficiency trap creates real problems:
Time spent editing AI output often exceeds time saved. Her team found they were spending more time editing AI output than the tools were saving them. Add in the governance concerns and the security issues that come with integrating these tools into platforms like Google Ads and Google Analytics, and the math stops working.
Team stress increases without measurable results. Asking people to squeeze AI experimentation into the gaps of their regular workday means constant context-switching — "10 minutes or 30 minutes in between their work day task switching or multitasking on getting this out the door and then also playing with AI and trying to come up with a metric that is proving that it's working."
Everyone optimizes for the wrong KPI. Volume of content. Speed of production. Number of tools in use. None of these measure what actually matters: does it work better than what came before?
Goldstein's solution is to separate exploration from execution entirely. Instead of squeezing AI experimentation into the gaps of a regular workday, she blocked real time for it. Every two weeks, her team spends four hours on a Friday doing nothing but testing and playing with AI tools. No deliverables. No metrics to report.
The goal isn't to find efficiency hacks. It's to discover what's possible. "I'm not asking for you to solve the world's problems. I'm not asking you to come up with a new solution of how we're going to create graphics or ads. I just want you to learn and explore. And then we can come up with a holistic way of how we're going to implement this that makes sense for the entire team, not just one person."
It's a close parallel to Google's practice of setting aside dedicated time to build new things, which produced some of their best-known products. Results have already come out of those sessions at Gorilla Logic. For an upcoming sales kickoff, the team found ways to combine video tools that produce high-quality output without new subscriptions or significant spend. They built the workflow themselves and can repeat it. Not doing the same things faster. Doing things they couldn't do before.
Speed and volume are secondary. The only metric that matters is whether the output performs better than what came before. Goldstein puts it plainly: if AI is writing ad copy and creating images, "it also should have a metric at the end of it that's saying they're performing better than the human ones. If they're not, then why are we using it?"
The KPI should never be:
Those metrics are easy to hit and easy to report. They say nothing about business impact.
The efficiency-over-quality trap also shows up in how marketers position themselves, and it's costing them seats at the table. Fewer CMOs sit in executive functions today. More marketing leaders report up to the C-suite rather than sitting in it.
Goldstein sees two things holding marketers back:
1. Failing to connect marketing data to business goals. Marketing teams get excited about their own metrics and struggle to tie them to what the CFO is reporting. When every other department talks pipeline and revenue and marketing shows up with click-through rates and open rates, the executive team tunes out. The fix is deliberate education: explaining what marketing-generated pipeline is, how it feeds sales pipeline, and why both numbers tell part of the same story.
2. Over-specialization. For years, marketers were rewarded for being specialists. Paid ads. SEO. Content. Demand gen. Each in its own lane. That era is over. "We all have a marketing background, we work in a marketing team, we work on integrated campaigns. We all need to be doing more in our roles and saying that I can be a Swiss army knife. That means I can do anything that you throw at me and I will take it and I will learn from it and I will excel."
PR now rolls up to Goldstein, something she hadn't done in 10 or 15 years. She didn't push back. The mindset is simple: never say it's not your role.
The willingness to stretch beyond a lane usually traces back to a leader who made it feel possible. Goldstein's approach with her own team: go to people directly, tell them you think they'd be great at something outside their scope, and show genuine excitement about it. "I think if more leaders went to their team and showed excitement and trust that they could do something that they haven't done, more people would continue to expand their horizons."
That excitement signals confidence even when the team member doesn't feel it yet. The alternative, waiting for someone to ask for a stretch opportunity, or defaulting to "that's not your job," produces a team that stops growing.
When Paxton Gray asked for parting advice for leaders trying to shake things up, Goldstein came back to one word: space.
Space to be creative. Space to learn. Space to make mistakes. Space to bring whatever is going on in your life to work and work through it. Her reminder to her team: "Thank goodness we are not saving lives. At the end of the day, we do not save lives and that's a blessing."
That's not permission to coast. It's permission to take real risks. "We can push the boundaries and it's okay to fail. Sometimes the best thing to do is to fail fast. Try something and say, this was unsuccessful. We have to try the next thing and move on quickly."
The teams chasing volume and speed will have dashboards full of activity. The teams asking whether it actually works better will have something more valuable: proof.
Connect with Whitney on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitneygoldsteinmba/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
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02:48 - Leading with truth and honesty when taking over a team
05:06 - The biggest mistakes marketing leaders make: moving too fast or too slow
13:38 - Why Gorilla Logic isn't "just another AI company"
18:46 - The dedicated exploration time approach: 4 hours every two weeks
35:20 - The Swiss Army Marketer: why specialists won't make it to the boardroom
43:50 - Creating space for teams: "This is PR, not ER"
With nearly 10 years of marketing experience, Whitney’s strategic direction as a B2B Marketing leader encompasses mission, vision, and strategy. Currently, Whitney serves as Director of Marketing at Gorilla Logic.
