Why You Should Slow Down and Market Intentionally to Make an Impact (with Ann Handley)

#409 | Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs and author of “Everybody Writes”, takes the Drive stage to make the case for slowing down in a marketing world built for speed. Using episode eight of a 1987 Mighty Mouse cartoon as her guide, she contrasts “cow mode” (fast, efficient, easy to measure) with “sloth mode” (slow, deliberate, harder to quantify). Ann argues that AI has scaled marketing’s cow energy as the job shifted from being seen to being chosen. She walks through her ASAP (as slow as possible) matrix for deciding when to move fast and when to slow down, and a “wallop tracker” that measures trust and resonance before a sale shows up. She illustrates her points with the story of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, where one marketer built a devoted following by choosing to matter more instead of mooing harder. Her throughline: when speed is cheap, judgment is what carries the premium.

Timestamps:

Join 50,0000 people who get The Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter

Learn 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: Webflow helps you get discovered in AI search and build fully custom sites without a developer, and its new Webflow Campaigns turns your brand system into on-brand landing pages and ads. Make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027 at webflow.com/exit-five.

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.

Convertiv - A B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-