If you work in B2B marketing, you know the Slack message. Someone from your team or sales or leadership has a lightbulb idea, and they need your help. The deadline is “whenever you can get to it,” but you can read between the lines: they need it yesterday.
The issue is that the person making the ask rarely has an understanding of how long these things actually take. There are data pulls, creative briefs, approvals, and more that turn a seemingly simple request into a group project that can take weeks.
We get it. We’re marketers, too, and we have a unique window into exactly what our customers go through. It’s one reason why one of the most common questions we get asked is, “How does Hightouch use Hightouch?” That’s why we spent the day with Gabs Maffly, Senior Manager of Demand Gen at Hightouch, to see what it’s actually like to ship a full campaign — in record time — using our own tools.
Watch the video and get to know Gabs with a quick Q&A below. And if you want to follow our exact playbook to launch your own campaign, see our step-by-step walkthrough here.
Meet Gabs
Name: Gabriella (Gabs) Maffly
Location: Los Angeles
Role: Senior Manager, Demand Gen
Team: Growth Marketing
Where you usually work: At home
Morning non-negotiable: Cortado or matcha
Number of tabs open right now: 21
What does your day-to-day look like?
I oversee channels like lifecycle, paid ads, and web, and find new opportunities for growth across campaign strategy, ad performance, and reporting.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
I started as Hightouch’s first SDR. I got my BS and MBA from Pepperdine and took a chance on a little pre-series A startup called Hightouch straight out of college.
But I always knew I wanted to be in marketing, so I started picking up work wherever I saw gaps. I ran organic social, then email. Eventually, I looked at what the business was going to need, wrote a job description, and pitched the founders on a new role for myself. They said yes, and the rest is history.
That’s the kind of place Hightouch is (and yes, we’re hiring).
What’s the hardest part of your job right now?
Ad platforms are brutal. It’s more difficult than ever to optimize creative for Meta and Google. Producing the volume of unique creative that the algorithms are looking for has become borderline impossible. If you’re not cycling in new concepts fast enough, performance tanks. That used to keep me up at night.
How are you solving that?
Honestly, Ad Studio. Creative fatigue used to be a consistent blocker for us. Ad Studio makes it a lot easier to keep up.
My direct report, Jamie, and I create almost all of our paid ads in it now. We used to produce about five per month, and now we’re closer to 40. For the first time ever, we even have an ad backlog, so there's always creative ready to go before fatigue sets in. And our CPC dropped from around $50 to about $10, which is the kind of number that makes my boss, Alex, jump out of bed in the morning.
Our director of design, Michael, has been a huge partner in making it work. He built the brand guidelines we use inside the tool, which means I can create and resize ads myself while knowing everything stays on-brand. Plus, the fact that Michael can trust the output means that he and his team get time back, too.
A lot of people feel overwhelmed by AI. What is one proactive step growth marketers can take today?
I think the best thing you can do is start with one workflow that's eating your time and see if you can make it faster. For me, that was ad creative.
Not everything I do touches AI. But these tools give my co-workers and me more time back to do the strategic work we were hired to do in the first place, without falling behind when new asks come in.
Michael focuses on big brand moments. Jamie focuses on performance optimization. And I can say yes to an urgent request from sales and actually deliver on their timeline, without pulling the proverbial fire alarm and sending the team into a panic or raising my own heart rate.
See how to launch your own targeted ad campaign by reading the playbook.
