Decoding AI for Marketing

Advertising execution is still surprisingly manual. Marketers and agencies juggle fragmented platforms, disconnected data, and countless hands-on tasks. When those systems are stitched together with new AI tools, they can create what Fluency CEO Mike Lane calls a “Frankenstack” of software.He talks about what it takes to truly automate advertising execution. Rather than simply adding an AI chatbot to existing workflows, Lane argues that companies need an integrated operating system that connects data, media platforms, workflows, and AI agents. The goal isn't automation for its own sake. By taking repetitive execution and error-prone tasks out of the workflow, AI can give marketers more time for strategy—and potentially provide new insights by continuously analyzing performance across an entire advertising portfolio.For further reading: Learn more about Fluency: https://www.fluency.inc/  Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://pod.link/1715735755

Is AI really the story of our time—or is humanity? In this special conversation at the MMA’s CMO & CEO Summit, former OpenAI Head of Go-to-Market Zack Kass joins host Greg Stuart to explore what he calls the “next renaissance”: a future where intelligence becomes abundant, AI agents reshape how consumers make decisions, and marketers must rethink how they create value. Zack argues that AI is not simply another software application—it’s foundational infrastructure that will transform how people work, shop, and interact with brands. They look at why fears of mass job loss may be overblown, how marketers can identify their place in customers’ “automation boundary,” and why brands need to prepare for a world where AI agents—not humans—may be navigating websites and making purchasing decisions. Zack also shares his optimistic view of technological progress, his concerns about society’s obsession with convenience, and why the future belongs to organizations that understand both human needs and machine intelligence. For further reading:  The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential by Zack Kass Future MMA events: https://mmaglobal.com/events Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://pod.link/1715735755

Justin Inman, founder and CEO of Emberos and AI brand visibility expert, explains why 'share of prompt' matters for how brands appear across LLMs. He discusses responsible optimization, model update timing, narrative consistency, schema and chunking for better ingestion, avoiding 'AI slop', and how AI visibility can predict real-world outcomes like box office performance.

Alex Sherman, CEO of Bluefish, helps enterprises manage AI as a marketing channel by optimizing machine-readable content. He explains why brands must control how they are represented in answer engines. Topics include closing the content gap for LLMs, new AI KPIs like visibility and favorability, machine-readable product data, funnel acceleration, and the rise of agentic commerce and paid AI placements.

Brian Stempeck, CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, builds analytics that measure how brands appear across LLMs. He discusses why sampling many prompts matters and how personalization and memory change AI results. He covers retargeting after AI searches, using panel data to observe real prompts, and practical first steps marketers can take to audit and improve AI visibility.

Paul Meinshausen, CEO and co-founder of Aampe, builds agentic personalization infrastructure for marketing. He explains how AI agents continuously experiment and learn from individual behavior. Conversations cover agent-per-user systems, tailored app messages and CTAs, safety guardrails, and real business uplifts from adaptive personalization.

Jamie Umpherson, Chief Creative Officer at Runway and former advertising creative director, explores how AI scales creative production and builds persistent world models for storytelling. He discusses AI as a new VFX pipeline, unifying UGC and localization at scale, and when hybrid versus traditional production makes sense. He also covers agentic feedback loops, versioning strategies, and operational approaches for agencies.

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 metrics of visibility. For further reading:  Copysmith.ai: https://www.copysmith.ai/ Comeback Town: He built a billion dollar company in Birmingham and so can you: https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2025/03/comeback-town-he-built-a-billion-dollar-company-in-birmingham-and-so-can-you.html From $250k Raised to $1.25B Exit w/ Shegun Otulana: https://bryce.medium.com/from-250k-raised-to-1-25b-exit-w-shegun-otulana-34e32912c603 More about Shegun: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheguno/ Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://pod.link/1715735755

Jeff Lunsford, CEO of Tealium and web analytics pioneer, explains why real-time data layers and identity matter for AI-driven marketing. He discusses real-time profiles, agentic customer interactions, agent authentication and negotiation, and how to ready enterprise systems for fast, agent-initiated experiences.

Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Quantcast and veteran in neural networks and programmatic advertising. He discusses the shift from rule-based systems to goal-driven AI. He explores how ML enables granular, real-time audience models. He highlights orchestration of multiple AI components and why measurement is the biggest bottleneck for marketing.