The Zillow Playbook for AI Safety Marketing

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Rebekah Bastian, CMO at mpathic, a company working with foundational AI model builders and enterprise AI application developers to prevent harmful or unwanted model behaviors. Rebekah's path to CMO came through product leadership — including 15 years at Zillow from the founding team — before taking on her first official marketing title at a 3D printing hardware company and then joining mpathic about seven months ago. At a company where the founding team is composed of psychologists, clinicians, and machine learning researchers producing genuinely novel work, her marketing challenge is precise: no deal should ever be lost because a qualified buyer hadn't heard of them yet.Topics Discussed:Why long-cycle enterprise deals with foundational model companies require awareness-first marketing rather than direct conversionHow the mPACT benchmark series works — testing leading foundational models across suicide-related conversations, eating disorder conversations, and misinformation susceptibilityWhy clinically-trained human annotators working through long-form, multi-turn conversations produce fundamentally different benchmark results than automated AI-driven evaluationThe Zillow playbook: building a dominant brand for years without an ad budget by becoming the most cited data source in every housing news story — and why that same approach is harder to execute nowRunning a three-person marketing team by treating subject-matter experts across the company as the editorial engineA strict internal rule for AI in content production: one stage only per piece — and why violating that rule is exactly where AI slop comes from//Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire. Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM