Decoding AI for Marketing
Decoding AI for Marketing is a podcast that explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping the marketing industry. Hosted by marketing and AI experts Greg Stuart and Rex Briggs, the show aims to bridge the knowledge gap for marketers who lack technical AI understanding. It features conversations with top marketers and AI experts, providing practical insights and strategies for leveraging AI in marketing. The podcast is produced by MMA Global, a nonprofit industry body focused on advancing marketing for CMOs.
Episodes
Is Share of Prompt the New Share of Voice?
Justin Inman, founder and CEO of Emberos, is entrenched in the world of influencing what AI says about brands. He shares why responsible optimization — not gaming the system — may determine which brands thrive in the next era of AI-driven discovery. Plus, why marketers need to think about authority, structure, and narrative consistency and how AI visibility may predict real-world business outcomes
AI is a Marketing Channel. Build Strategy Accordingly.
Alex Sherman, CEO of Bluefish, says brands need to start treating AI like a true marketing channel, not just another variation of SEO. As consumers shift from search engines to answer engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, Sherman explains why it’s no longer enough to simply “show up”—brands need to control how they’re represented, what data models learn from, and how they inf
AI is Rewriting Discovery. Are You Ready?
Brian Stempeck, CEO and cofounder at Evertune AI, says brands need to get smart about how they’re showing up across the major LLMs, from ChatGPT to Claude and Gemini and beyond - and a small sample isn’t enough to build a plan. He explains how Evertune samples AI platforms to help brands better strategize across channels, plus new tactics they’re experimenting with like retargeting users after the
Agentic AI Is Reinventing Marketing Personalization
Paul Meinshausen, CEO and co-founder of Aampe, sees a future where marketing is about learning, not targeting - where marketers, with the help of powerful AI agents, design interactions that help systems learn and improve continuously. Rather than sending the same message to millions of people, these agents can continuously experiment, learn from behavior, and adapt messaging and experiences to ea
Pushing the Boundaries of Creativity with AI
Jamie Umpherson, Chief Creative Officer at Runway, is using AI to power charge his - and his organization’s - creativity. Drawing on years in agencies working as a creative director, he shares how AI-powered tools are changing marketing, the bottlenecks that the technology can break down, and just how far the technology has come in a short time. Umpherson also shares how brands can scale while mai
GEO, Productivity, and the Rapid Pace of Marketing Tool Change
Shegun Otulana, CEO of Copysmith.ai, says there’s a widening gap between marketing teams that use AI tools on the edge, and ones that have fully rebuilt their processes around AI. He explains how his company is focusing now on the shift to GEO, how he’s built and continues to build AI-powered products for specific client needs, and why share of voice, mentions, and citations are becoming the new m
Your AI Strategy Is Only as Good as Your Data Layer
Jeff Lunsford, CEO of Tealium, says that as enterprises rush to deploy agentic AI, batch processing and siloed systems won’t cut it: AI strategy lives or dies on the quality — and speed — of your data. In this episode, we explore what a true real-time data layer looks like, why most companies are underutilizing their marketing tech, and how brands must prepare for a world where AI agents — not hum
Why Rule-Based Marketing Is Breaking
Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Quantcast, explains the shift from rule-based “expert systems” to goal-driven, autonomous AI, the evolution of DSPs, the hidden limits of “AI-washed” platforms, and why measurement—not targeting—is the biggest bottleneck holding marketing back. Drawing on three decades of experience in neural networks, machine learning, and programmatic advertising, he shares
The Next Evolution of AI, Search, and Advertising
Michael Walrath, Chairman and CEO of Yext, says today’s AI is fundamentally rewriting the rules of search, discovery, and brand visibility. Drawing on his extensive ad tech experience at DoubleClick, Yahoo, Moat, and now Yext, Walrath explains why AI-powered search is so much more powerful than traditional search—and why many current assumptions about GEO, SEO, and advertising are headed for a fas
AI Hype Vs. Reality at CES 2026
Shelly Palmer, professor in residence at Syracuse and expert in all things AI, returns to the show to offer up what trends he saw at CES, and where the marketing industry is going. He explains how fast AI is changing every day, what marketers need to be doing to keep up, and why the technology is still underhyped.For Further Reading:CES 2026 Day 1: https://shellypalmer.com/2026/01/ces-2026-day-1-r
The Truth About AI Chatbots in Marketing (and How It Can Be Fixed)
Sid Sudhakaran, Head of Data Strategy & Engineering for North America at Kantar, explains the benefits of the company’s ambitious AI assistant: KAiA. He explains how it democratizes data, when chatbots work for marketers (and when they don’t), and the real customer pain points they are tackling each and every day. For Further Reading: Embedding Artificial Intelligence in the World’s Largest Compan
SEO Has Been Upended. Here’s What the Future Could Look Like
Bill Gross, founder of Overture (the company that created paid search) and now ProRata.ai, says that generative AI is fundamentally rewriting the rules of search - which means marketers, advertisers, and customers must all adapt to new ways of discovering products. Gross explains ProRata’s business model, how advertising will evolve inside AI-generated results, what a fair-value model for publishe
Scaling Up Your Agentic AI Marketing Team
Jacob Bank, Relay.app founder and CEO, says the days of building up a huge marketing department might just be over. The Relay.app platform helps teams design and deploy custom AI agents, without losing impact. Bank explains why the old model of hiring is on the way out, why he offers step-by-step guides to users on how to effectively build agents, and how marketers can rethink scale, autonomy, and
The Growth of Commerce Media (and What AI’s Got to Do With It)
Diaz Nesamoney, Founder, President, and CEO of Jivox, says that commerce media is fast becoming the next big wave in advertising, thanks to transaction-level data that makes personalization more precise than search and social media ever could. He explains how commerce media is growing beyond retail and how AI allows that scale, as well as the complexities marketers face when handling diverse produ
Adobe AI and Keeping Your Brand Safe
Hannah Elsakr, Vice President of New GenAI Business Ventures at Adobe, hears from enterprise marketing leaders every day about what they really need from their AI tools. She talks about why so many marketers are still hesitant to adopt AI into their workflows for true transformation, and how Adobe Firefly is helping to create commercially safe and ethically sourced generative AI to open new doors
Have You Automated Enough?
Wade Foster, CEO and cofounder of Zapier, says the next frontier for marketers isn’t just shiny AI agents, but practical AI workflows. By weaving automation and intelligence into the systems teams already use, marketers can reduce manual tasks, accelerate lead management, and unlock new personalization at scale. Wade explains how Zapier has moved beyond basic integrations to become an orchestratio
Entering the Age of Supermarketers
Sandeep Menon, cofounder at Auxia, says AI is quickly enabling the marketing industry to enter the age of “supermarketers” - where individuals can do the jobs of all different kinds of specialized marketers with the help of AI tools. He unpacks how agentic AI is changing the game by creating tools to compress roles, accelerate experimentation, and drive deeper personalization at scale. From lifecy
How AI Aids Your Go-To-Market Strategy
Paul Yacoubian, founder and CEO at Copy.ai, is on a mission to cut down go-to-market bloat. One big way that AI can help marketers, especially at larger organizations, is in creating standardized content creation processes - and integrating those outputs into existing companies at the organization. It can mean efficiency and scale that saves thousands of employees time, and can increase the satisf
The Challenges of AI Marketing in Heavily-Regulated Industries
Steve Erbentraut, Managing Director at Marketbridge, works with clients every day in highly regulated industries who are caught in a tug of war: innovate with AI enough to beat out the competition, but minimize risks so as not to break down the trust of customers. It’s a delicate dance, and Erbentraut spells out what it means for implementing AI solutions in the marketing arms of organizations in
Marketing Will Be Upended Sooner Than You Think
Vikrant Batra, cofounder of Maximon.ai and former CMO at HP, says that if you aren’t already well on your way in your AI journey, your marketing organization is in serious trouble. He details why he left his former corporate employer to strike out in an AI business, how fast change is coming, and why the financial side of companies will be coming for the marketing department - if they haven’t alre
AI Is Upending Media Planning and Buying
Mark Polyak, Chief Product and Technology Officer at MINT.ai, says that embedding agents is transforming every step of the advertising resource management process. He explains how his background in counterterrorism helps shape his approach to AI and data integration today. Plus, he shares how MINT.ai is using multi-agent systems, synthetic data, and emerging protocols like MCP to help marketers do
Why AI Isn’t Enough for a Winning Marketing Strategy
Doug McColgin, Director of Marketing Strategy at UScellular, says that AI tools aren't enough to build an effective marketing strategy. As more and more companies adopt AI, the playing field will be leveled when it comes to productivity gains. But McColgin thinks AI can be used in more creative ways to differentiate from your competitors. He explains the tests his organization has done, and how tw
AI Adoption and Experiments with Microsoft’s Jen Kattula
Jen Kattula, CMO at Microsoft Advertising, has been testing out ways to improve the jobs of marketers through AI - while at the same time trying to improve organizational effectiveness. She shares use cases from Microsoft, how she thinks about agents and human intervention, and the hurdles around getting people trained up and in the habit of using AI. For Further Reading:More about the AI Agents H
The Next 90 Days of Your AI Rollout
Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute and Smarter X, left his agency world behind and now spends his days training marketers on how to better use AI to move their organization forward. When it comes to AI adoption at marketing organizations, there’s still a wide range of adoption - and Roetzer shares what he’s seen in terms of what trips people up, and where they should be puttin
AI is Changing the Consumer Journey, According to Google and BCG Research
Sadie Thoma, director of US B2B marketing at Google, and Derek Rodenhausen, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, say that artificial intelligence is having a major impact on marketing - especially when it comes to the consumer journey. They partnered on new research that shows that the four main consumer behaviors today are streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping - and t
How US Bank and Supergood Made an AI-Driven Campaign
Michael Lacorazza, CMO of US Bank, and Mike Barrett, Founder and CSO at Supernatural AI, set out to break the mold: to partner together on an advertising campaign for the large financial institution using innovative AI methods and achieving fast results. If you’re interested in how to partner with AI agencies to take your work to the next level, listen to this case study about “The Power of Us” ca
The Basics of AI Marketing (And What the Future Holds)
Shiv Singh, co-founder of AI Trailblazers and the author of Marketing with AI For Dummies, knows that there’s still a huge range of adoption in the marketing space when it comes to artificial intelligence. He shares tips for those still early in their journey, and predictions for 2025 when it comes to how the marketing industry will be further upended by the technology. For Further Reading:Check o
Typeface Founder Abhay Parasnis on the Future of AI Marketing Workflows
Abhay Parasnis, founder of Typeface, is making a big bet on where artificial intelligence will truly reshape the marketing industry. After experience at Adobe and other large organizations, Parasnis ventured out on his own in 2022 to work on a tool to solve the fundamental problem in marketing today, the “content paradox.” He explains why there’s a gap between data and cloud technologies, and the
Marketing AI Trends That Emerged from CES
Shelly Palmer, Professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and CEO of The Palmer Group, reports on the AI marketing trends he is most excited about coming out of this year’s Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas. He talks about what’s over and underhyped - from superautomation and agents to content creation and beyond. And we’ll hear predictions as to how AI in mar
Embedding Artificial Intelligence in the World’s Largest Companies
Ashok Kalidas, Chief AI Scientist at Kantar, helps Fortune 500 companies think about the cutting-edge technologies they need now and the best ways to implement new AI and ML tools into their organizations to take their marketing strategies to the next level. He explains the technology behind some of Kantar’s latest use cases and where he thinks the industry is going next. For Further Reading: Lear
How Teradata Uses AI to Create Brand Stickiness and More
Jacqueline Woods is the Chief Marketing Officer at the software company Teradata. She has a unique vantage point as both a CMO herself and as someone who works with other companies every day to better leverage technology, data, and artificial intelligence. She explains how companies can think more strategically about their AI implementation, where personalization is heading next, and the most effe
Truly Understanding Consumer Behavior - with the Help of AI
Jeremy Fain, CEO and Co-founder at Cognitiv, is on a mission to better predict consumer behavior with the help of artificial intelligence. The deep-learning advertising platform was founded in 2015 and has since built tools to help brands connect with their customers in a more precise way - a necessary capability for marketers now and into the future. He walks us through the use cases that are mos
The Secret to Success with AI? Building the Right Marketing Organization
Omar Rodriguez-Vilá is a professor of marketing at Emory University and a partner at MarCaps, and was previously a practitioner at Coca-Cola. He’s looked at the ways some of the best marketing organizations out there have changed their structure and habits in the wake of the AI revolution, and he has data to share. He argues that great marketing leaders in today’s environment need to both explore
AI Marketers, Digital Transformation, and Lessons from Starbucks Mobile Pay
Adam Brotman, co-founder and co-CEO at Forum3, an AI lab, has spent his whole career helping brands embrace technologies to lead them into the future. Now, with his co-founder Andy Sack, he’s taking what he’s learned about places like Starbucks and J. Crew and building and testing tools around artificial intelligence that can help marketers at every size organization. In this episode, he talks abo
The New Dimensions of Your AI Marketing Technology
Yaniv Makover, CEO and cofounder of Anyword, says that no company - large or small - will end up with a one-size-fits-all AI stack for their marketing teams, Instead they will be vertical, horizontal, and native. The best marketers - and best organizations - will take that into account and think of ways for different systems to more effectively communicate with each other. Anyword is an AI writing
Using AI to Champion Consumer Needs
Joshua Browder, CEO and Founder of DoNotPay.com, thinks one of the biggest ways AI will change marketing is in its power to help consumers advocate for themselves. While companies are finding all kinds of efficiencies and competitive advantages for themselves with AI, there’s also a huge opportunity for individual consumers. What started as an attempt to fight his own parking tickets has now grown
Digging Deeper on the AI Conundrum with Rex Briggs and Caleb Briggs
Marketers - and businesses overall - face a fundamental conundrum about artificial intelligence: it has an incredible power to recognize patterns, but not all patterns are reliable. Host Rex Briggs and his son Caleb Briggs set out to explore that tension in their new book, The AI Conundrum: Harnessing the Power of AI for Your Organization--Profitably and Safely. They explain what people still don’
Are You Placing the Right Bets In Your AI Strategy?
Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, works with clients at the world’s largest organizations to shape the future of marketing. He’s spent his career picking the winners: deciding which technologies to invest in to help his company get an edge in the increasingly competitive marketing landscape. In the AI space, he’s partly doing that by not putting all his eggs in one basket; instead, his comp
Venture Capital, AI, and Marketing: Where Are The Opportunities?
Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director at Zetta, has been there since the early days of the Internet, even starting as the first summer intern at Netscape. After time at Facebook and VMWare, she entered the venture capital space with the first AI-focused VC firm, Zetta. Now, she and her partners are looking for the biggest opportunities in the startup ecosystem around AI, and she explains what some o
Startups like Pictory Tap LLMs to Improve Your Marketing Workflow
Vikram Chalana, CEO of Pictory, says the future of marketing - and all content - is video. He looked at the ways in which AI could increase efficiency for content creators, and that was the inspiration behind the company. Pictory makes video creation easier by allowing the average business user to repurpose existing content like articles and white papers and make videos to publish across multiple
MediaMonks is Pushing Marketing Boundaries with AI
Wesley ter Haar, founder of MediaMonks and Executive Director at S4 Capital Group, has always been on the cutting edge of digital first production. The company has doubled down on their AI bet, and he shares some of the latest use cases they are developing for clients with AI, including consumer proxies, scaling up personalization, retrieval-augmented generation, and streamlining workflows.For Fur
The Age of Agents is Coming and It Will Upend Marketing
Amit Shah, founder and CEO at the startup Instalily.ai, says that the age of AI agents is on the horizon and it will change commerce, marketing, and our lives in all kinds of profound ways. Shah has previously seen major digital transformations while serving as president of 1-800-FLOWERS, among other roles. He explains that the increased use of agents will fundamentally change how marketers go to
How Salesforce Uses AI and Cloud to Improve Customer Relationships
Marty Kihn, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Salesforce, explains some of the biggest ways that AI has impacted their business in recent years. Salesforce now centers around a Customer Data Platform, or CDP, and Kihn talks through some of the key decisions around data, vendors, and layers of AI models that can change the game for all marketers. For Further Reading: Attention is All You NeedPal
CPG and Why The Best AI Projects Start with a Business Problem
Lu Cotterill is Global Senior Director, Full Funnel Marketing AI / ML at Kellanova (which spun out of legendary brand Kellogg). As a marketer in the CPG space, she’s always searching for the best data available to inform business decisions. In her current role, she focuses on how AI can help them better reach customers. CPG has its own set of challenges, but Lu has found the best way to test use c
AI's Influence on Marketing: A Ripple Effect Across All Business Verticals
Gopi Kallayil is the Chief Business Strategist for AI at Google, which means he has a bird’s eye view of the technology and its implications at one of the world’s largest companies - and all the partner companies they work with. Author of The Happier Human: Being Real in an Artificially Intelligent World, Gopi had spent a good portion of his professional life focused on the relationship between hu
How AI is Helping Us Understand and Streamline Messy Customer Data
Barry Padgett is CEO of Amperity, a company using AI to solve this problem: large companies now have lots and lots of marketing data, but it is all coming from different systems and services. That means you might have info about a customer in different places across your portfolio, without the ability to integrate that data to get a more complete understanding of that customer. Especially as acces
What Walmart is Learning About Marketing Tech and AI
Large retailers like Walmart are in some ways at an advantage when it comes to implementing new technology like AI that depends on data, with insights being constantly aggregated across stores, products and customers. But large companies also come with complexity, and complexity is exactly what Saleel Sathe deals in every day. He’s the vice president of performance marketing at Walmart and has a b
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Building a Smart AI Marketing Roadmap
While many are enthusiastic about AI, few companies have a smart roadmap in place for its development and implementation. Instead, many people either start from scratch and try to build the capability internally from zero, or buy up other AI companies without much of a plan.Jim Lecinski’s approach, outlined in his book "The AI Marketing Canvas: A Five-Stage Road Map to Implementing Artificial Inte
How AI Startups Can Show Us What’s Next in Marketing
What does the Empire Strikes Back and the Flux Capacitor have in common? They are both analogies that Tom Chavez uses when he talks about just how exciting and challenging this moment is in AI and marketing right now. Chavez previously sold two startups - one to Microsoft and one to Salesforce - but today is doubling down on AI as the technology to push marketing forward. He explains his work at s
The AI Takeover and Why Creative Matters More Than Ever
If everyone has access to the same powerful tools, where can marketers stand out? It comes from the inputs, and the thoughtful creative behind the assets. Alex Collmer is the founder and CEO at VidMob, a creative performance platform for marketing. In this episode, he chats with Greg and Rex about the ways they are using AI to better analyze data and adapt content to audiences. He shares insights
Designing Effective AI Tests at Ally (and Measuring Results the Right Way)
It’s not enough to just be testing out AI on various teams and seeing what might stick. The best organizations are pulling together an AI strategy, designing careful tests across all parts of the company, and gathering data on the results to implement at scale where it makes sense. At Ally, Chief Information, Data and Digital Officer, Sathish Muthukrishnan, works closely with the company’s CMO to
Is AI The New Bar to Clear for Creative?
AI is already being used by marketers in campaigns they create, but today’s guest, Carlo Maria Ferrari, Global Content & Creators Lead at Sanofi, says the best creative will still be made by humans. Hear why he sees GenAI as a way to check your brainstorms and make sure your ideas are truly original: in a sense, making AI the new bar that great creative needs to clear. Ferrari leads the Global Con
AI Will Infinitely Improve Localization
Artificial intelligence has been used in both marketing and in the travel and hotel industry for years, but gen AI is a game changer in a number of ways. In this episode, we speak with Michael Menis, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at IHG Hotels & Resorts, about two trends he foresees will change the game in his industry: the ability to localize content at scale in a way never before see
Quick Take: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Board Drama
It’s been a whirlwind week for Sam Altman at OpenAI - where he was removed by the board and has now been reinstated. It’s the biggest news in artificial intelligence this week, and hosts Greg Stuart and Rex Briggs give their takes and share their past experiences with boards making decisions like this.
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://pod.link/1715735755
Are You Leading an AI-Ready Marketing Organization?
What can marketers learn from digital transformations in the retail space?Ratnakar Lavu became the first ever Global Chief Digital Information Officer at Nike - a job that he took on during the height of the pandemic. Today, he advises startups and brings in his years of experience including his time as CTO at Kohl’s to help think about the future of business - and how AI is a part of that. He sha
Why Marketers Have a “Seat at the Table” in the Growth of AI
Been hearing a lot about AI but think it’s more something for the CTO to worry about? Think again.Janet Balis is the marketing practice leader at EY Consulting. Hear why marketers, and especially marketing leaders, are poised to play a pivotal role when it comes to how organizations integrate AI into their businesses to gain a competitive edge. It starts, she says, with clean and organized data a
Introducing: Decoding AI for Marketing
AI is moving fast, and one of the places it’s most quickly becoming a necessity is in the marketing space. But a lack of basic AI understanding and a lack of the necessary technical acumen is holding many marketers and organizations back. On this show, marketing and AI experts Greg Stuart and Rex Briggs help demystify the intricacies of AI, through conversations with marketing industry leaders and
Recommended
10 Minutes with Jesus
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
10 minutos con Jesús
10th Floor Podcasts
10 to Life
1128 MINISTRY
11 O'Clock Comics Podcast
123 GO! Food
1-2-3 Learn Spanish with Me!
128 Civics Questions for U.S. Citizenship Test
12 Hour Sound Machines for Sleep (no loops or fades)
#12minconvos
