Paid Ads Playoff: Proven B2B Plays That Turn Spend Into Pipeline

#376 | Eight marketers. Two minutes each. One live bracket to crown the best-performing paid ad play. We brought back the Blitz Exit Five Live session format - this time for the Paid Ads Playoff: a head-to-head paid ads showdown, where marketers pitch their single best ad from 2026 in real time to our live voting audience. The plays cover a lot of ground: scroll-stopping creative for an unfamiliar category, testing TV as a full-funnel channel, measuring out-of-home, a 9-minute LinkedIn video that beat every short clip, incentivized demo offers, ChatGPT ads, fighting Google's AI Overviews in paid search, and the most creative ad creative you've ever seen. Presenters include Alexander Goodwin (Fingerprint), Stefanie Wlotzki (SurveyMonkey), Jake Newby (Lendio), Anthony Blatner (Speedwork), Dylan Wingrove (Pacvue), Kenna  Rooney (EasyLlama), and Shlomo Genchin (Unbored.com), co-hosted by Jess Cook of Vector.Timestamps (00:00) - - Welcome to the Paid Ads Playoff format (05:32) - - Making an unfamiliar B2B category scroll-stopping on paid social (08:04) - - Testing TV as an always-on demand channel (10:23) - - Measuring out-of-home ads with control markets (13:03) - - Why a 9-minute LinkedIn video beat every short clip (15:48) - - Q&A: targeting, TV attribution, and matching creative to the platform (25:49) - - Incentivized demos and gift-card offers that convert (28:32) - - Testing ChatGPT ads and shifting budget out of Google (32:40) - - Fighting back against Google's AI Overviews in paid search (34:50) - - The soap opera ad and turning boring software into a story (48:13) - - Tracking signals and structuring content for a long-form ad (55:05) - - The analogy framework behind the year's best-performing ad Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Optimizely - the AI platform for marketers. Build your own AI agents or pull from a directory of 50+ pre-built ones for marketing use cases. Their new Virtual Teammates can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive.Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, letting modern marketing teams build fully custom sites that perform in AI search with no developer needed. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Zoom Webinars & Events – The virtual event platform built to help B2B marketers run webinars that actually drive pipeline, with branded registration pages, live engagement features, and built-in tools to repurpose sessions into clips and content. Learn more at zoom.com/exitfive.Compound Growth Marketing - A full-funnel demand gen agency helping high-growth cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey, combining AEO, modern paid advertising, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Podcast listeners get two free media planning sessions to find out what channels are driving the best ROI. Learn more at compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exitfive. ***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more