The Zillow Playbook for AI Safety Marketing

About this episode

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Rebekah Bastian, CMO at mpathic, a company working with foundational AI model builders and enterprise AI application developers to prevent harmful or unwanted model behaviors. Rebekah's path to CMO came through product leadership — including 15 years at Zillow from the founding team — before taking on her first official marketing title at a 3D printing hardware company and then joining mpathic about seven months ago. At a company where the founding team is composed of psychologists, clinicians, and machine learning researchers producing genuinely novel work, her marketing challenge is precise: no deal should ever be lost because a qualified buyer hadn't heard of them yet.

Topics Discussed:

• Why long-cycle enterprise deals with foundational model companies require awareness-first marketing rather than direct conversion

• How the IMPACT benchmark series works — testing leading foundational models across suicide-related conversations, eating disorder conversations, and misinformation susceptibility

• Why clinically-trained human annotators working through long-form, multi-turn conversations produce fundamentally different benchmark results than automated AI-driven evaluation

• The Zillow playbook: building a dominant brand for years without an ad budget by becoming the most cited data source in every housing news story — and why that same approach is harder to execute now

• Running a three-person marketing team by treating subject-matter experts across the company as the editorial engine

• A strict internal rule for AI in content production: one stage only per piece — and why violating that rule is exactly where AI slop comes from

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Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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