Running a Media Company Inside HubSpot with Jonathan Hunt (VP, Media and Content)

#368 | Dave sits down with Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot, to talk about what it means to run a media company inside a software company, and why that framing changes everything about how you build a content team. Jonathan runs a 70-person operation reaching 50 million people a month across 17 YouTube channels and a creator network of 150. They get into how HubSpot thinks about the three jobs of content (demand gen, influence, and earned media value), why gated PDFs are dead and what's replacing them, how Jonathan's team built an AI clipping engine in a six-week sprint, and how to tell the measurement story to a public company's CFO. Plus: what Jonathan looks for when hiring, how creator partnerships actually work at scale, and why "creative freedom" without strategy is just chaos.Timestamps (00:00) - - - Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot (03:17) - - - Running a media company inside a software company (07:47) - - - From the HubSpot blog to a network of 150 creators (11:22) - - - How to find creators (and the tool Jonathan recommends) (12:39) - - - The three jobs of content: demand gen, influence, and earned media value (17:22) - - - How to tell the measurement story to your CFO (20:42) - - - Why gated PDFs are dead and what converts now (24:00) - - - What actually works in creator partnerships (31:21) - - - The AI clipping engine HubSpot built in six weeks (45:38) - - - HubSpot's public code of ethics for AI use 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