Why the B2B Demand Gen Playbook Is Broken — And What Comes Next (w/ Jon Miller)

Jon Miller has had a front-row seat to every major shift in B2B marketing over the past two decades — from co-founding Marketo and helping define the marketing automation category, to pioneering account-based marketing at Engagio, to serving as CMO at Demandbase. Now, he's channeling everything he's learned into Phave, an AI-native startup built to reinvent demand generation from the ground up. Jon joins Brand Humanity Show host Anthony Kennada for a wide-ranging conversation about why the playbook he helped write is no longer working — and what it will take to build the next one. Jon makes a provocative but data-backed case: a dollar of new ARR costs 70% more to generate today than it did in 2021, pipeline goals are being missed across the board, and SDR-qualified conversations have dropped by more than half since 2014. The old model treated demand generation like a gumball machine — put a dollar of campaign spend in, get leads out — while ignoring the fundamental truth that B2B buying is a complex, nonlinear system that can never be fully attributed or mechanized. Together, they unpack why MQL-driven thinking produced bad behaviors across the industry, why brand was never optional, and why the shift from rules-based marketing automation to AI-native reasoning represents the most transformative change in the category's history. Jon explains what "rules to reasoning" actually means in practice — and why it makes true one-to-one personalization at scale finally possible after 25 years of chasing that promise. They also get into the bigger picture: what it means to market in a world where buyers complete most of their journey anonymously, where 80% arrive at a vendor conversation with a preferred choice already made, and where AI agents are increasingly mediating the shortlist. In that world, brand isn't a soft metric — it's existential infrastructure. Topics we cover:  – Why the economics of demand generation are broken — and what the data actually shows  – How B2B buying became a complex, nonlinear system that attribution models can't capture  – Why MQL-obsessed marketing trained buyers to avoid us  – The Socratic approach to convincing CFOs and boards that the playbook has to change  – The shift from rules-based automation to AI-native reasoning — and why it changes everything  – What Phave is building and why "AI native" means something fundamentally different at the architecture level  – Why strong brand and product-market fit are the prerequisite — not the bonus — for demand gen to work  – How the three-layer MarTech stack of the future (data, decisioning, delivery) will reshape the category  – Why brand recognition is becoming the primary way you get shortlisted by AI agents  – The cocktail video paradox: why the content that's hardest to measure often has the biggest brand impact  – How Jon stays grounded — and optimistic — through relentless uncertainty If you're a CMO, demand gen leader, or founder trying to understand why the old playbook is failing and what an AI-native approach to marketing actually looks like in practice, this is the conversation to start with. Because the future of B2B demand generation isn't about sending more emails or building better nurture tracks. It's about earning a place on the shortlist before the buyer ever raises their hand — and that requires a fundamentally different way of thinking about brand, trust, and what it means to build a marketing system that actually works.