Marketing Trends

A bank just issued the world's first loan to an AI agent. The agent applied, signed, and set its own repayment schedule. That's where marketing now lives — and most teams are still optimizing for the wrong layer. In this episode, Katja Forbes (founder of The CX Evolutionist and author of the field guide on machine customers) explains why AEO is a trap, why "the more discoverable you are, the more...

What if everything you're optimizing for in marketing — attention, clicks, engagement — is a proxy for the one thing that actually drives action? Pranav Yadav is the Founder & Global CEO of Neuro-Insight, the world's largest measure of memory. His company maps brains to determine what advertising actually does to people — second by second — with an 86% correlation to real-world sales. In this conv...

Your blog will never earn an audience. Ever. That's not me — that's Melissa Rosenthal, who ran the SEO content engine at ClickUp, built media at BuzzFeed and Cheddar, and is now co-founder of Outlever building the playbook that replaces it. In this episode, Melissa makes the case that the SEO blog era is collapsing in real time, that one strategic LinkedIn poster will out-perform 150 employees doi...

Every CMO is being told to replace people with AI agents as fast as possible. Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive, is doing some of that — and deliberately refusing to do other parts of it. The line she's drawn between the two is the most useful rubric we've heard in months. Attentive runs SMS, email, push, and RCS for thousands of consumer brands — a category where the temptation to automate everything...

Most CMOs think personalization requires complex AI and endless customer segments. Elizabeth Maxson proves otherwise. She breaks down actionable personalization strategies — from geo-tagging that drove a 51% lift in event attendance to playful homepage tricks that captured marketers' attention and boosted engagement. The takeaway: Stop overcomplicating personalization. Start with big buckets and s...

What happens when your next customer isn't even human? Chris Koehler is the CMO of Twilio, and his 2026 marketing plan lasted exactly one month before AI agents forced him to rethink everything. In this conversation, Chris gets real about why planning horizons have collapsed from years to weeks, what happens when AI agents — not humans — are doing the buying, and why brand might matter MORE in an...

Merriam-Webster named "slop" the 2025 word of the year - and it explains everything about where AI-generated content is heading. Elizabeth Maxson, CMO of Contentful, reveals the uncomfortable truth about AI adoption: 96% of CMOs say it's a top priority, but only 65% are making meaningful investments. The gap between enthusiasm and execution is costing teams momentum. She breaks down research condu...

Best practices told you to optimize reputation across all 10,000 locations equally—but granular competitive data just revealed that 7,000 of those stores don't need it, and you're wasting millions on the wrong priorities. The era of broad-based marketing is over. Michael Walrath (CEO & Founder of Yext) reveals why we're entering a "post-best-practice world" where context trumps everything. From th...

Most websites are bleeding traffic before visitors even see the page… and Google Analytics can't tell you it's happening. Pantheon's data shows that if your site takes longer than 2 seconds to load, users swipe away before your page even renders. The magic number is now under 1 second, and mobile users expect websites to feel identical to opening an app. Josh Koenig (Co-Founder and SVP of Marketin...

What if the marketing channel getting the least resources is actually shaping your entire brand reputation? Daniella Sampson reveals why B2B teams chase the wrong AI trends while underfunding social media. She breaks down GEO vs SEO, why monitoring 10,000 prompts daily is mostly noise, and how AI agents are forcing brands to evolve from social listening to social intelligence. She explains her 300...

Every startup hits the same ceiling: your founder customers love you, but they won't get you to $200M. So how do you move upmarket to enterprise without losing the community that built you? Harmony Anderson, VP of Growth & Marketing at Superhuman, gets into the real mechanics of it: The 70/30 resource split between enterprise and community Why she's hiring a "startup evangelist" to hold down their...

In January 2026, a CMO at a six billion dollar software company scrapped his entire year's marketing plan only two weeks into the year. AI agents made it obsolete. Stephanie Postles, CEO of Mission.org, and Lacey Peace, VP of Content, explain in plain English what AI agents are, why they are fundamentally different from the automations marketing teams rely on today, and what this shift means for m...

Most brands think viral marketing takes months of planning and massive budgets. Nick Tran engineered it in 72 hours.   In this segment from Marketing Trends, the former Global Head of Marketing at TikTok breaks down the exact reverse-engineered playbook that turned unknown creators like the Ocean Spray skateboarder into overnight viral sensations, and why the traditional 2-3 month campaign timelin...

The marketing teams winning with AI today are not the ones chasing every new model release. They are the ones who found the boring, repetitive tasks their teams hate and automated those first. Nir Pochter, Co-Founder and CMO at Lightricks, joins Stephanie Postles on Marketing Trends to break down what AI actually means for creative workflows and why most teams are still using it wrong. You’ll lear...

The websites that win today are not the ones with the most content. They are the ones that deliver a fast, clean experience in the very first second a visitor arrives. Josh Koenig, Co-Founder and SVP of Marketing at Pantheon, joins Stephanie Postles on Marketing Trends to break down what he is seeing across thousands of high-traffic sites and why most teams still miss the basics. He explains how t...

The most future-ready marketing leaders aren’t the ones chasing trends… they’re the ones who can reinvent themselves every time the industry changes. Michelle Huff, Chief Marketing Officer at Alteryx, joins Marketing Trends to break down the mindset that kept her relevant through every major tech revolution, from Web1 to cloud, SaaS, PLG, and now AI. She explains how to balance curiosity with focu...

The strongest marketing leaders are not the ones with perfect plans. They are the ones who know how to lead through real life. And few people understand that better than Niki Hall and Dayle Hall. Niki, former CMO of Five9, and Dayle, CMO of SnapLogic, join Marketing Trends to share how they balance two big careers, raise a family, and approach marketing from completely different angles. They break...

The brands everyone talks about are not the safest ones. They are the bold ones. And few people understand that better than Nick Tran. The former TikTok Global Head of Marketing and current Diageo President and CMO joins Marketing Trends to break down how he built momentum inside fast moving environments, rebuilt brands under pressure, and helped TikTok become a cultural engine instead of just ano...

When everyone has access to the same AI tools, what separates the great from the forgettable is the human behind the screen. Fiverr’s VP of Global Brand Communications, Shiri Hellmann, joins Marketing Trends to break down how her team turns chaos into creativity. From producing the viral “Gary” campaign with real freelancers to writing a rom-com about avocados, Shiri reveals how Fiverr spots cultu...

Brands don’t live in campaigns… they live in memory.   In this episode of Marketing Trends, Ulli Appelbaum, Founder & CSO of First The Trousers Then The Shoes, joins Stephanie Postles to unpack how brand associations and mental availability determine what people choose long after the ad ends.   From Geico’s 15%, Snickers’ hunger fix, and Nike’s evolution of “Just Do It,” to Salesforce’s AI rebrand...

How do you market the experience of walking through rooms of illusion that flip reality on its head?   In this episode, Stephanie Postles chats with Andy Levey, the mastermind CMO behind the Museum of Illusions, to discover how to craft unforgettable moments that captivate audiences. Learn how to apply these strategies to market brands that sell experiences - from local business, SaaS, B2B, and mo...

He became CMO of GoodRx in just five years, then started taking big swings: reviving nostalgic jingles, building an audio-first brand strategy, and proving that sound can punch through today’s visual overload. Ryan Sullivan joins Marketing Trends to share how he moved from performance marketer to CMO at record speed, why he’s betting on radio and podcasts, and how a singing prairie dog and memorab...

Monster trucks, skeletons, and a CMO who doesn’t think about cost analysis very often.   In this in-studio conversation, Torq CMO Don Jeter breaks down how brand-led world-building beats feature dumps, why entertainment now matters more than information on the trade show floor, and how a Monster Jam partnership and an episodic LinkedIn “junior intern” series created real pipeline by earning mental...

What does it take to rebrand a 40-year-old tech giant — and make it relevant for the AI era? Stephanie sits down with Ann Minooka, Chief Marketing Officer at Synopsys, to uncover how she’s redefining brand storytelling in one of the most complex spaces in tech. From repositioning a legacy company to pioneering demand generation strategies that deliver real pipeline, Ann shares her full playbook —...

If you’re still optimizing for traditional SEO, this one might sting. But if you’re ready to win the AI search wars, welcome to your new bible. Michael Walrath (CEO of Yext) is not sugarcoating our new AI-dominated environment that has transformed the market. He breaks down exactly how search is being torn apart by AI, why local SEO is being rewritten in real-time, and what it actually means to st...