Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli

AI can explain a marketing concept. Can it apply that concept to a business decision, recognize a flawed assumption, or judge whether a recommendation will work?

Ray Burke, E.W. Kelly Professor of Business Administration at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss research published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing with co-authors Maximilian Matthe and Alex Leykin. Their work examines how accurately general AI models hold and use foundational marketing knowledge.

Burke describes strong performance on recall and understanding, with weaker results as questions demand application, analysis, and evaluation. The conversation explores why identifying false statements can be harder than confirming true ones, how a user's assumptions shape the response, and why proprietary marketplace knowledge remains important when competitors have access to the same tools.

They also consider how junior marketers will develop expertise as AI takes on work that once provided practice. Burke offers practical suggestions for framing problems, requesting multiple perspectives, and critiquing recommendations before acting on them.

Marketers know how to make a purchase easy, turn a choice into a default, and use social cues to influence behavior. What happens when we apply those same tools to ourselves?

Margherita Petrone, enterprise account director at Zappi, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explore how consumer behavior principles can help us examine our routines and make desired changes easier. They discuss what calendars and spending patterns reveal about our priorities, when to add or remove friction, and how the people around us shape what feels normal. The conversation also considers when planning becomes a way to manage anxiety and why a habit deserves a review even when we have become very good at maintaining it.

From putting running shoes beside the bed to slowing down an impulse purchase, the episode offers practical ways to use skills marketers already have in their own lives.

For decades, marketers have measured media down to the decimal while judging creative largely on instinct. Alex Collmer, founder and executive chairman of Vidmob, has spent nearly a decade trying to change that by turning creative decisions into data.

Collmer explains how creative data can reveal why an ad works, not simply whether it worked, and how brands can measure creative performance against outcomes ranging from brand recall to sales. He also discusses what marketers risk when they hand advertising over to black-box AI systems such as Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max, whether generative AI will push brands toward creative sameness, and why proprietary creative intelligence may become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage.

Young consumers can be tired of juggling streaming service subscriptions and still think the content is worth paying for. They can worry about social media and still use it to discover shows, encounter news, and decide which films deserve to be seen in the theater.

In this episode, MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss research on entertainment and news among 1,500 consumers aged 13 – 39 in the US and Canada, plus a preview of their latest research into moviegoing trends. They discuss how TikTok and YouTube influence TV discovery, why getting news on social media does not necessarily mean abandoning established news organizations, and how costs shape Gen Z choices.

Many companies are under pressure to use AI, but how many can show what their AI investments are doing for the business?

On this episode of Up Next, Gabriella Mirabelli talks with Anna Convery, CMO of Verint, a customer experience automation company that works with more than 80 of the Fortune 100. They discuss why so many AI pilots stall before reaching production, how marketers should measure AI success, and why the right starting point is the desired business outcome rather than the technology itself.

Convery argues that companies should work backward from the outcome they want to achieve, then determine where AI can create meaningful value. The conversation also explores the role of human judgment in an AI-enabled workplace, why human expertise remains essential, and what organizations need to do to move AI from pilot projects into enterprise-wide use. Convery emphasizes the importance of executive sponsorship, training, organizational readiness, and a workforce that combines people and AI according to where each is most effective.

In this episode:

• Why AI pilots often fail to make it into production
• How to measure AI by business outcomes rather than activity
• Why some common AI metrics are really vanity metrics
• How AI can augment human judgment rather than replace it
• Why companies don't necessarily need to rip and replace their existing technology
• How customer interactions can become a source of real-time market research
• Why CMOs need a seat at the table when AI reshapes customer experience
• What marketers should learn before engaging with contact center leaders
• Why AI is only as good as the data behind it

Word of mouth has long been one of marketing's most powerful tools, but marketers still struggle to understand what makes it effective. On this episode, we talk with Koen Pauwels, Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM), about how word of mouth has changed from the early days of social media to the age of influencers and generative AI.

Pauwels' research offers several important lessons for marketers:

• Word of mouth can dramatically outperform paid marketing.
• Not all word of mouth is equal.
• Influencer marketing depends on the objective.
• Online conversations are not necessarily representative.
• Real buzz travels.
• Generative AI makes third-party credibility even more important.

The takeaway for CMOs: word of mouth is too valuable to ignore, but too complicated to measure with a single social listening dashboard. Brands should cultivate genuine advocacy, understand what they are paying influencers to accomplish, and connect those investments to measurable business outcomes.

Dr. Cody Coleman built the benchmarks that got rival AI labs and hardware makers to agree on how to measure machine learning performance. Now, as founder and CEO of Coactive AI, he's tackling a harder problem: teaching AI to understand content the way people do, not just tag it. Cody joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain why general-purpose AI models fall short in advertising, how a benchmark like MediaPerf changes the game, and where human judgment must stay in the loop, no matter how sophisticated the system gets.

Young consumers increasingly say they prefer shopping in physical stores. But that doesn't mean they're abandoning digital. MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, joins host Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss new research on how Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and millennials shop and manage money.

They explore why the mall comeback is more complicated than the headlines suggest, how young consumers move fluidly between online and in-person shopping, and why AI is becoming part of product research without taking over the purchase itself. The conversation also looks at mobile wallets, changing financial behaviors, and a persistent gender gap in investing.

For brands, the opportunity may not be choosing between physical and digital, but understanding how young consumers move between them.

Anku Rani, a doctoral researcher at MIT and an MIT Tata Center fellow, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to challenge a working assumption in AI video production: that a better-looking clip is automatically a better clip. Rani built a culture score that separates identity, behavior, and context, then tested it against leading video generation models and against real viewers from nine countries. The results complicate how brands should think about choosing a video model for global campaigns, especially once cinematic polish and cultural accuracy start pulling in opposite directions.

Do process photos increase charity donations?

Josh Lundberg, assistant professor of marketing at North Carolina Central University, joins Up Next to answer that question. His research with colleagues, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, finds that photos showing a charity's process, the actual steps taken to help someone, get people to donate more than the standard before-and-after photo. Gabriella and Josh talk through why this works, when it doesn't, and what any charity can do about it right away.