Hey Marketing Besties,
Let’s talk about Ross Simmonds for a second.
If you’ve spent any time in B2B or SaaS marketing, you know the name.
He’s the founder of Foundation, the content agency behind marketing for Canva, Procore, Snowflake, Jobber, Gusto, MasterClass, and Adobe (ever heard of ‘em?).
He’s the guy who coined “create once, distribute forever”, which you’ve probably used in a LinkedIn post at some point without crediting him (RUDE).
BuzzSumo and SEMrush both named him one of the most influential marketers alive. He’s got a Harry Jerome Young Entrepreneur Award sitting on a shelf somewhere. Forbes, HuffPost, VentureBeat, BET, and CBC have all put him in print.
The man has receipts.
But ignore all that for a second. Let’s talk about Cocktail Party Ross.
A few years back, when Ross spoke at Marketingland Festival, he opened with a confession: he cannot, under any circumstances, stay focused in a conversation at a networking event.
Case in point: he once introduced his wife as his “butter half,” because he’d gotten so absorbed eavesdropping on a debate about where to store butter (fridge vs. counter, lfg) that he’d stopped tracking his own conversation entirely.
Turns out, there’s a real name for this: the cocktail party effect. It refers to the brain’s built-in ability to tune out every voice in a room except the one it cares about.
Ross’s point wasn’t about parties, though. It was about us.
“The internet is the loudest cocktail party ever,” he said. And marketers are the ones who turned up the volume.
Every one of us was told to create more, post more, say more, until the signal got buried in our own noise.
Here’s why we’re bringing this up: Ross is back for Marketingland Festival 2027. He’s headlining Growthstage and you need to be there.
This year’s theme is System Update, and nobody’s better suited to a reboot than someone whose entire philosophy is “stop making more, start making what you have work harder.”
MLFest is 100% free, 100% virtual, and built for Marketers who’d rather leave with one idea that actually changes how they work than ten they’ll forget by Friday.
