B2B marketing content and rock and roll have nothing in common. That’s exactly the problem

One is loud, dangerous and unapologetically itself. The other plays to committee and hopes no one notices. Jason Miller has spent a decade in the rock and roll business and another building content marketing careers at LinkedIn, Marketo and ActiveCampaign – here’s what a career spanning both taught him about personality, risk, and why consistency beats virality.

Most B2B marketing plays at background volume. It’s polite, inoffensive, easy to talk over. Rock and roll has never had that problem – it walks in loud and makes you look up, whether you wanted to or not. In a recent episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast, I sat down with Jason Miller, who spent a decade in the music industry before building a content marketing career at LinkedIn, Marketo, ActiveCampaign and now V7 Labs, to work out why so much B2B content still defaults to the safe option – and why that’s quietly the riskiest choice of all.

Jason’s not arguing that B2B should be more like rock and roll for the sake of it. His point is narrower and more useful: the music industry solved a problem B2B marketing still hasn’t – how you earn attention from people who have every reason to ignore you. And a lot of what he learned on tour buses and in radio station car parks, doing artist development for bands most of us will never have heard of, translates more directly to a B2B content strategy than you’d expect.

Fans, not leads

The first thing Jason noticed moving from music into B2B was the language. “They never called their fans leads,” he told me. It sounds like a small distinction, but it isn’t. The music industry built its entire economics around community – people who show up, who wear the shirt, who follow a band because they’re genuinely invested, not because they downloaded a whitepaper. B2B, by contrast, has spent two decades optimising for volume: more names, more downloads, more marketing-qualified leads, regardless of whether anyone on that list actually cares.

Jason’s example was Iron Maiden, still selling out stadiums and picking up rave reviews from broadsheet critics decades into their career. Not everyone at that festival is there for the music alone – some are there for the shirts, the ritual, the shared identity. Not everyone is going to love Iron Maiden, and that’s fine. The point isn’t universal appeal; it’s depth of connection with the people the brand is actually for.

That’s not an argument against measurement – Jason is emphatic that everything should be tracked. It’s an argument about what you’re building. A list of leads is an asset you rent. A community that likes you is one you own.

“Get people to like us”

Nowhere did that show up more clearly than at Marketo, where Jason’s entire brief from co-founder and CMO Jon Miller was three words: “Get people to like us.” Not click a like button – like the brand. When Jason asked what his budget was, the answer was equally direct: spend what you need within reason, but track everything you possibly can.

There was no funnel diagram behind that instruction, no attribution model. Just a bet that likability compounds – and it did. It’s why brands like Marketo and, in its early days, HubSpot broke through in a category that had previously sounded identical from vendor to vendor. They had personality, and people wanted to get closer to them.

The one-hit-wonder trap

The harder lesson is what happens when brands try to manufacture that kind of breakthrough on demand. Jason’s music industry instincts flare up whenever he sees a B2B case study built around a single spectacular campaign – the same handful of examples recycled at every marketing conference for a decade. Old Spice is one. The other, inevitably, is Volvo’s “Epic Split” – Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits between two reversing trucks, filmed to a swell of dramatic music. It’s genuinely brilliant. It’s also the only B2B truck advert most people can name a decade later, which is precisely the problem.

Jason recalled watching one of the case-study presentations built around a moment like that, where someone finally asked the obvious question: if it worked so well, why didn’t you do it again? “They didn’t have an answer,” Jason said.

That’s the trap. A viral moment can work for a brand as big as Volvo, absorbing the miss if it doesn’t land again. For a startup, chasing a one-hit wonder without the budget or distribution to back it up just gets you lost. The more useful question isn’t “how do we go viral” – it’s “how do we show up in a way we can actually repeat.”

Personality versus brand safety

None of this is straightforward once you’re inside a large organisation, and Jason is candid about that tension. At Microsoft, where he was brought in to “make Bing look cool,” good ideas routinely died one of two ways: diluted by committee until nothing distinctive survived, or approved right up until the moment someone decided the risk wasn’t worth taking. Move to a startup, he says, and the constraint disappears – but so does the safety net.

His answer isn’t recklessness. It’s being deliberately smart about where the personality shows up: steer clear of the genuinely divisive topics, but be likable, be specific, and actually say something. He points to what works for the biggest personalities on TikTok – not because they’re saying anything remarkable, but because people like them and want to be around them. Take that likability and personality, he argues, and combine it with a steady stream of ideas that are actually useful, and you have something that works for a brand in almost any industry. In fact, he thinks it gets easier the smaller and more specific the niche – you’re not trying to be everything to everybody, just genuinely useful to the people who are actually listening.

Consistency over virality

If there’s a single thread running through everything Jason said, it’s that consistency beats virality – showing up, having a point of view, and resisting the urge to only publish once every idea is polished and complete. He’d like to see more marketers “posting the draft”: working in public, letting a community help shape half-formed ideas rather than only ever presenting finished thinking.

He illustrated the point with a story about the producer Rick Rubin and the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Under the Bridge.” Anthony Kiedis wrote it as a private, personal piece about addiction and never intended to share it with the band – it didn’t fit the album they were making. Rubin found it, pulled it out of him, and it became one of the defining songs of the decade. “He wrote it for himself,” Jason said. “And it never would have seen the world. And that’s okay.” The lesson isn’t that everything you make for yourself should go public – it’s that the best work often comes from creating without an audience in mind, and having the judgement to know what’s worth sharing.

That instinct – creating something because it’s true to you, not because it’s engineered to perform – is exactly what an audience can tell the difference on. It’s a theme that runs through most of the conversations on this podcast: trust in B2B isn’t built through more polished content. It’s built when an audience can tell that what they’re reading, watching or listening to actually came from somewhere real. Jason put it plainly: people can tell when content is “AI slop” versus something with a genuine, strong opinion behind it – and they gravitate toward the latter.

Practical takeaways

You don’t need a music industry background to apply any of this, but a few shifts are worth making deliberately.

1. Start by auditing your own language. If your team still talks primarily in leads and MQLs, ask what you’d do differently if you were building an audience instead of a database – the tactics often converge, but the mindset shift changes what you prioritise.
2. Resist the urge to chase someone else’s viral moment. If a competitor’s campaign is getting attention, the more useful question isn’t “how do we do that” but “what’s the equivalent move we could actually repeat, given our budget and our audience.”
3. If you’re inside a larger organisation, don’t wait for permission to be interesting everywhere at once. Pick one recurring point of view – a theme, a format, a perspective you’re willing to defend – and be consistent about it, rather than trying to win brand-safety approval for a big swing every time.
4. Get comfortable sharing work before it’s finished. A half-formed idea posted consistently will usually build more trust with an audience than a fully polished piece published once a quarter.
5. And don’t let personality become an excuse to stop measuring. Jason’s own playbook – “get people to like us, but track everything you possibly can” – is a reminder that likability and discipline aren’t in tension. The goal isn’t content with no accountability; it’s content that earns attention first, so the numbers underneath it actually mean something. As Jason’s own career shows, the things you make because you have something to say tend to travel further than the things engineered to be liked.