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 interchangeable you are," and what the actual moat looks like in agentic commerce. Fresh off a trip to Alibaba, BYD, and Unitree Robotics in China, Katja walks through the five types of machine customers already in market, why Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles is the B2C playbook, why Walmart's AI procurement is the B2B playbook, and the one mindset shift every marketing leader needs to make this quarter.

What you'll learn

• Why AEO and machine-readability are table stakes, not strategy

• The values-as-data play: how Patagonia and Walmart are already winning the agentic moat

• Why you can't greenwash an AI agent (and what to do if your supply chain receipts aren't flattering)

• The abundance-vs-efficiency mindset shift — and why stripping headcount for AI gains is corporate anorexia

Attentive helps brands personalize messages across SMS, email, RCS, and push - so every interaction feels relevant, not random.

Not more marketing. Better marketing. 

That’s marketing made personal. That’s Attentive. 

Connect
Katja Forbes on LinkedIn

The CX Evolutionist on Substack

Marketing Trends

Chapters

• 1:34 Inside Alibaba, BYD, and Unitree — what China is shipping today

• 4:09 How robots get their brains (and start transacting)

• 7:05 The 5 types of machine customers every marketer should know

• 10:37 Alibaba's 120-million-order onboarding campaign

• 13:33 Your car is reading your emotions — and about to buy on your behalf

• 16:31 What the US can actually learn from China's stack

• 23:12 "Marketing to robots is not a thing" — the AEO trap

• 27:36 A bank just gave the world's first loan to an AI agent

• 29:32 Why BJ Fogg's behavior model breaks for machine customers

• 37:17 The decision-paralysis problem and the rise of values-as-data

• 40:14 Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles: the brand moat playbook

• 45:39 Walmart's Pactum: B2B values-as-data is already live

• 54:51 Marketers need to start acting like scientists

• 56:53 Abundance, not efficiency — the corporate anorexia trap

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 conversation, he makes the case that memory is the only metric that matters, explains why hyper-personalization is destroying culture, and breaks down exactly why Budweiser's most iconic Super Bowl ad failed at the brain level while Samsung's Wallhuggers became their most successful campaign ever.

Pranav Yadav is a former Goldman Sachs trader turned neuroscientist, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Ad Age 40 Under 40. He created the Neuro Impact Factor — the brain-based metric that all Australian out-of-home media is now traded on.

Key takeaways

• 90% of all memory is subconscious — brands have been measuring the wrong 10%

• $750 billion in annual marketing spend is wasted because recall ≠ memory

• The brain is a pattern-seeking storytelling device — personal relevance opens the door to memory

• Hyper-personalization destroys the shared cultural memory that makes marketing work

• The #1 rated Super Bowl ad (Budweiser Lost Puppy) placed the brand at the exact moment the brain stopped encoding memory

• Samsung's Wallhuggers hid the brand for 45 seconds and became their most successful campaign

Follow Pranav on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pranavyadavpy

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:31 The Urdu Couplet That Opens the Conversation

2:28 Marketing Has Been Leaning on Pseudoscience for Decades

5:09 Why Memory Is the Only Metric That Matters

8:32 The Shirt Test: Recall vs Memory

12:23 How to Get Into the 90% — Story Is the Boat

15:17 What 5,000-Year-Old Vedic Rituals Teach About Memory

19:41 Alexander the Great vs the Naked Wise Man

24:28 MasterCard's Priceless: Finding the Core Truth

27:29 Why Brands Don't Do This (It's Hard)

32:23 Brain Mapping: How Neuro-Insight Actually Measures Memory

39:26 Brand Architecture: The Formula Every Brand Needs

43:48 Why Hyper-Personalization Will Destroy Society

50:54 Why 90% of Super Bowl Ads Fail at the Brain Level

54:17 Budweiser's Lost Puppy: The #1 Ad That Failed

58:04 Samsung Wallhuggers: Genius at the Memory Moment

1:00:25 Why LLMs Are Trained on the Shadow of Thinking

1:07:41 Vows, Not Values: How Neuro-Insight Stays Creative

1:15:51 The Neuro Impact Factor: Changing How Australia Trades Media

1:19:57 What Makes a Great Billboard

1:20:23 Where to Find Pranav

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 doing employee advocacy, and that while every other B2B operator is betting on AI, she's betting on humans — and using AI to do it. She's also dogfooding the entire thesis with her new publication, The State of Brand, which hit a million unique views in three weeks.

What you'll learn

• Why the SEO blog was a 'slot machine' — and what survives the AI search collapse

• The two-month consistency rule that separates real owned media from content theater

• Why one strategic LinkedIn poster beats 150 employees doing employee advocacy

• The one-to-one distribution playbook replacing mass organic traffic

• How Melissa's State of Brand publication converts at ~40% to demo on banner ads (yes, banner ads)

• Why product parity is now enough to beat 15-year incumbents — if your brand, service, and POV are sharper

Connect

Melissa Rosenthal on LinkedIn

The State of Brand

Outlever

Marketing Trends

Chapters

• 0:00   The SEO blog era is over

• 1:30   What's lighting Melissa up: State of Brand hits 1M views in 3 weeks

• 4:30   BuzzFeed → Cheddar → ClickUp: why B2B needs B2C instincts

• 7:33   Why Outlever built its own publication (and dogfooded the thesis)

• 13:00  How to make B2B content go viral without AI slop

• 18:50  Quality vs quantity: the false binary killing content teams

• 22:14  Why one strategic poster beats 150 employees

• 25:37  The two-month consistency rule

• 26:33  'Your blog will never earn an audience'

• 30:17  Everyone says video-first. She's going text-first.

• 32:24  Melissa is excited about banner ads (yes, really)

• 37:00  'Figma should be a little worried'

• 40:04  You don't need a better product to beat a 15-year incumbent

• 43:14  Betting on humans while everyone else bets on AI

• 53:44  $50B incumbents can be beaten in 18 months

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 is maximum. But Keri's strongest customer-loyalty moment last year wasn't an AI agent. It was a single text from a real human after a graduation dress arrived without its matching belt. 'I will buy a million more things from them.'

This episode is the rubric: where AI is unlocking near-100% revenue lifts, where iOS 26 just quietly killed 80% of your text marketing, and the customer moment no agent count can replace.

• Why brands using AI hands-off-the-wheel are seeing near 100% revenue lift — and the two customers proving it

• How iOS 26 broke text marketing for 80%+ of devices, and the 2Tap opt-in fix most brands don't know about

• The personalization rubric that gets 91% of consumers to say yes

• The metric CFOs are asking marketing leaders about right now instead of CAC

• The one customer moment that no AI agent can replicate — and why it's the only outcome that matters

Keri McGhee on LinkedIn

Attentive

0:00 Stop Selling AI, Start Proving Outcomes

1:16 What Changed in AI Marketing This Year

2:03 Why 90% of CMOs Experiment, But Few Scale

5:29 Why Attentive Doesn’t Lead With “AI” Anymore

6:32 Channel Affinity: Fewer Messages, Better Revenue

8:06 100% Revenue Lift

10:55 Identity AI and the Send-Time Unlock

12:34 The Best Practice Killing Your Deliverability

14:16 iOS 26 and the New Rules for Text Marketing

15:26 Why 2Tap Matters for SMS Consent

17:41 LLM Discovery, GEO, and the New Search Funnel

21:23 Why Consumers Distrust AI But Use It to Shop

24:22 The Tuckernuck Story: When AI Still Feels Personal

28:27 Why CMOs Have to Get Their Hands Dirty

32:14 The KPI Replacing CAC

34:21 Why Martech Is Consolidating Again

36:31 How to Spot Real AI vs. Rebranded AI

38:00 Stop Counting Agents. Measure the Experience.

43:10 The Skill AI Can Quietly Take From You

44:24 How Brands Should Prep for BFCM

46:38 Lightning Round: Trends, Skills, and Frameworks

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 simple, contextual changes.

Chapters

00:00 - Why Personalization Should Be Simple

00:32 - First-Time vs Returning vs Current Customers

01:07 - Marketer vs Developer Homepages

03:01 - Geo-Tagging: +51% Attendance

04:28 - The Big Buckets Approach

05:28 - The Lorem Ipsum Attention Hack

06:22 - Ruggable Cat vs Dog Personalization

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 AI-driven world, not less.

Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, a $5B+ customer engagement platform. Previously, he led marketing at Box and helped build the analytics engine at Adobe.

Key takeaways:

• Why using AI to speed up bad processes is the wrong move — you need to reimagine them entirely

• The agent buying continuum: SEO → AEO → human-to-agent → agent-to-agent

• Why brand awareness becomes MORE critical when agents do the discovery

• The 'frozen food vs pizza' framework for the future of software

• How to stop feeling paralyzed: the quadrant exercise he uses to prioritize AI initiatives

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ckoehler/

Learn more: twilio.com

Chapters:

00:00 Meet Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio

01:44 The Healthy Tension Between IT and Marketing

02:44 Planning in Weeks, Not Quarters

04:40 The Rise of Asynchronous AI Work

07:22 Unlearning 30 Years of Marketing

11:37 Frozen Food vs Pizza: The Future of Software

14:07 Content Scarcity to Content Abundance

15:51 Could AI Agents Fix the Privacy Problem?

17:11 The Agent Buying Continuum

22:12 The Tsunami Most People Can't See

24:40 How to Get Embedded in LLM Recommendations

26:33 Does Brand Matter When Agents Are Buying?

31:01 Measuring Success When You Can't Track Anything

33:12 The AI Agent Webinar Experiment

36:44 What Events Look Like in 2029

42:48 How Chris Curates AI Intel Daily

46:22 Advice for Paralyzed CMOs

49:01 Lightning Round

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 conducted with The Atlantic, surveying 425 global marketing leaders. The findings expose why teams are stuck in experimentation mode, what top performers do differently, and why soft skills matter more than prompt engineering.

We explore evidence-based creativity, the rise of the full-stack marketer, and simple personalization strategies that actually move the needle - including the geo-tagging change that increased event attendance by 51% and the Lorem Ipsum homepage trick that drove 250% more engagement.

If you're tired of tools that promise speed but deliver sameness, this episode is your blueprint for moving from workslop to real strategy.

Chapters:

00:00 The Volume Trap: More Content Doesn't Equal Better Content

01:27 The Optimism-Execution Gap: Why CMOs Aren't Investing

10:05 AI Slop: When You Recognize Your Own ChatGPT Output

13:04 The Homepage Login Discovery

15:50 Why Simple Geo-Tagging Works

18:34 The Lorem Ipsum Homepage Experiment

19:29 Ruggable's Cat People vs. Dog People Strategy

28:00 The NASCAR Slide That Almost Went Wrong

31:17 Hiring Full Stack Marketers: Soft Skills Over Hard Skills

43:00 Course Correction Year: Two Pieces of Homework

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 the 10,000 taco restaurant problem (why you're overspending on 7,000 stores that don't need help), to why pay-to-play platforms like Forrester and Gartner face disruption, to how ChatGPT's memory will match insurance agents to customers based on shared interests like golf—without anyone typing a single preference.

You'll learn why software and services are blending (Palantir trades at 105x revenue for this reason), why store managers need localized control instead of centralized brand police, and how AI context windows are fundamentally shifting from generic queries to completely bespoke recommendations. This is the playbook for moving beyond one-size-fits-all tactics into hyper-personalized optimization at scale.

Chapters:

00:00 Is "Content Everywhere" Already Outdated?

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Marketing at Pantheon) reveals what's silently killing growth: the brutal shift in user expectations, how AI crawlers swarm websites like "denial of service attacks" on UFC fight nights, and why companies need to structure content for LLMs as "research assistants." He breaks down the 5 evergreen SEO tactics that still work—question/answer formats, schema markup, Reddit engagement, strong brand voice, and ungating content—plus why chasing AI micro-trends is risky.

From understanding what data Google Analytics can't see to learning why gated content is dying in the LLM era, this is the framework for building websites that survive both human impatience and AI crawler swarms. If you're still optimizing for 5-second load times or seeing unexplained traffic drops despite good rankings, this shows you exactly what's broken.

Chapters:

00:00 - Page Speed's Silent Kill (Bounce Before Load)

02:10 - The Magic Numbers (1 Second Good, 2 Seconds Dead)

04:04 - AI Crawlers Swarming Sites (UFC Fight Night Case)

08:54 - Five Evergreen Rules for the LLM Era

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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-data-point framework, manually analyzing competitors across websites, LinkedIn, Instagram, press releases, and ads to create spider chart visualizations revealing genuine white space opportunities. She details why ChatGPT failed to automate this work, why brand fatigue doesn’t mean consumers are tired of you, and why Coca-Cola has never changed their red.

We explore how to build a properly resourced social team, why B2B brands need to ditch corporate TikTok dances, why LinkedIn + TikTok is the top B2B combo in 2026, and why consistency beats perfection every time.

Chapters:

01:10 - Why GEO Matters More Than You Think

02:36 - GEO vs SEO: Conversations Over Keywords

06:44 - Hidden Brand Mentions You're Missing

09:32 - AI Agents and the Future of Social Intelligence

16:12 - Why AI Still Needs Human Taste

17:25 - The Most Valuable AI Use Cases Right Now

37:49 - The 300 Data Point Framework Explained

46:20 - Building the Right Social Team in 2026

48:16 - Where B2B Brands Go Wrong on Social

49:30 - LinkedIn + TikTok: The B2B Power Combo

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.