Feb 27, 2026 · 55 min · 9 segments
After helping scale three of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history — Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce — Bill Macaitis joins Brand Humanity Show host Anthony Kennada for a candid, data-backed…
Anthony KennadaHost
What question were you personally trying to answer when you kicked off this initiative?
Yeah, we, I think originally I worked with Carol Lou, John Miller and Ray Reich.
And I just knew like when I was kind of going through all these different companies, like this data was just really hard to find non-existent or it cost you like a million dollars to get.
And it was kind of like, hey, what if we just like, all went on LinkedIn and just said, Hey, guys, like, we're just fellow marketers.
How do you tackle brand versus demand, Jen? What budget do you put towards it? Like, how do you track it? You know, there wasn't any cost to get the research.
We just all kind of contributed our time to help, you know, promote it and get some some weight behind it.
So I think that's the first thing is like, at least for me, this was like kind of cool data.
Like, we're not some company that's selling you something that the results skew towards it.
We were just literally like CMOs that were like, this is really hard, right? Like it would be nice if we had some benchmarks and everything too.
We knew like budgeting season was coming up and we were kind of like, Hey, it'd be nice to actually have some benchmarks that, Hey, overall industry, they're spending this much on brand.
You know, cause that was always a common question I would get from startups I worked with.
A million, or a hundred or like 50% of our budget or they, you know, there's just not like a lot of good data out there.
So I think that was kind of the Genesis behind it and kind of why we really wanted to, you know, all help out and get this data and kind of democratize it.
I think there's no, I don't know how to word this the right way, but like there's, it's people can be passionate about this topic on LinkedIn and say like really bold, convicting things that get a lot of likes and retweets, like, but putting it into practice, getting approval, defending it to your CFO.
Um, that's, this is a hard conversation to have to your board and without data to kind of help make the claim or kind of, you know, bring people along for the journey.
What question were you personally trying to answer when you kicked off this initiative?
Yeah, we, I think originally I worked with Carol Lou, John Miller and Ray Reich.
And I just knew like when I was kind of going through all these different companies, like this data was just really hard to find non-existent or it cost you like a million dollars to get.
And it was kind of like, hey, what if we just like, all went on LinkedIn and just said, Hey, guys, like, we're just fellow marketers.
How do you tackle brand versus demand, Jen? What budget do you put towards it? Like, how do you track it? You know, there wasn't any cost to get the research.
We just all kind of contributed our time to help, you know, promote it and get some some weight behind it.
So I think that's the first thing is like, at least for me, this was like kind of cool data.
Like, we're not some company that's selling you something that the results skew towards it.
We were just literally like CMOs that were like, this is really hard, right? Like it would be nice if we had some benchmarks and everything too.
We knew like budgeting season was coming up and we were kind of like, Hey, it'd be nice to actually have some benchmarks that, Hey, overall industry, they're spending this much on brand.
You know, cause that was always a common question I would get from startups I worked with.
A million, or a hundred or like 50% of our budget or they, you know, there's just not like a lot of good data out there.
So I think that was kind of the Genesis behind it and kind of why we really wanted to, you know, all help out and get this data and kind of democratize it.
I think there's no, I don't know how to word this the right way, but like there's, it's people can be passionate about this topic on LinkedIn and say like really bold, convicting things that get a lot of likes and retweets, like, but putting it into practice, getting approval, defending it to your CFO.
Um, that's, this is a hard conversation to have to your board and without data to kind of help make the claim or kind of, you know, bring people along for the journey.
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