Tip
Carilu Dietrich talks about spending hundreds of millions on advertising at Oracle and Atlassian: “Oracle spent a ton of money, and people still didn’t like us because they had poor experiences with the salespeople or the product had languished… your product has to really be fantastic. And to do good brand advertising, it has to be sustained over a long period of time.” She contrasts this with Snowflake: “For many years, it was only the billboard on 101. It was just sustained and strategic.”
Turns out AI product marketing works the same way.
Your board wants to spend $2M on an awareness campaign—conference sponsorships, LinkedIn ads, podcast tours, influencer partnerships. The AI agent product is functional but hallucinates occasionally, the UX is clunky, onboarding takes 3 calls. Marketing says a big campaign will drive awareness and adoption.
You’ve watched this movie before. At Atlassian, they spent millions advertising HipChat with an Office Space spoof. Product had uptime issues, feature gaps. Slack pulled ahead. The advertising didn’t save it—it just amplified a mediocre experience to more people.
Younger marketers think awareness drives growth. They want the billboard, the Super Bowl ad, the big launch. You know better. You’ve seen companies spend millions on advertising mediocre products and watch customers churn after trying them. You’ve also seen products with tiny marketing budgets (Zoom, Slack, Figma) win through product quality and word of mouth.
The pattern: advertising amplifies what already exists. If your product is incredible, small sustained campaigns compound (Snowflake’s single billboard). If your product is mediocre, massive campaigns just burn money faster. That judgment—knowing when to invest in marketing versus when to fix the product first—comes from watching enough companies waste advertising budgets on products that weren’t ready.
Context
Carilu Dietrich spent hundreds of millions on advertising at Oracle (airports, Wall Street Journal front pages, Ironman sponsorships, arena takeovers) and millions at Atlassian. She watched Oracle’s massive spend fail to overcome product and sales issues, and watched Atlassian’s HipChat advertising fail against Slack despite creative campaigns.
For experienced marketers, this pattern recognition is critical—you’ve seen enough advertising campaigns succeed and fail to know product quality is the multiplier, not the marketing spend itself. That wisdom only comes from watching both sides repeatedly.