Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli

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.

Jack Myers, media ecologist, futurist, and Peabody Award-winning author, joins Up Next to argue that AI has not solved the judgment problem in business; it has hidden it. As intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, discernment becomes the scarce asset, and Myers explains why organizations keep outsourcing trust to algorithms instead of building it in people. The conversation covers the coming collapse of agency holding companies, why hiring processes filter out the humans who matter most, and what CMOs should stop, start, and continue doing with their media budgets. A direct look at what AI changes, and what it doesn't.

Dan Coates, CEO and co-founder of YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain why the youth research firm built a direct connector into Claude and other similar gen AI systems. Coates describes YPulse's move toward what he calls decision support infrastructure: survey data atomized down to the individual respondent, queryable alongside a client's own internal data. The reports and question design that built the business haven't gone away; the connector is a new path into that same research. The conversation covers data provenance, the EU AI Act's consent requirements, and why Coates believes AI models are becoming a distribution channel for research vendors.

Scott Goodson founded StrawberryFrog, a global agency built on a philosophy he calls movement marketing. In this episode, he and Gabriella Mirabelli trace that framework from its origins through decades of application across healthcare, automotive, consumer goods, and fintech. Goodwin explains why the building blocks of any real movement include dissatisfaction and a named nemesis, and why brands that skip those elements tend to produce noise rather than momentum. The conversation covers Pampers, Northwell Health, Smart car, and a recent Visa campaign that generated 20,000 organic posts without paid media.

Rod Duclos, Associate Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business School at Western University, joins Up Next to discuss research published in April 2026 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM). The paper, co-authored with Amir Sepehri and Jonah Berger, draws on over 160,000 real complaints and five controlled experiments to show that the grammatical voice customers use when filing a complaint reliably predicts escalation risk before any explicit threat is made. The conversation covers the mechanism behind this signal, its limits, the looming AI confound, and what a CMO should do with it.

Joshua Lifrak spent five years building the mental skills program for the Chicago Cubs, including the 2016 World Series championship run, before taking that framework into the corporate world. His book, Win Today, lays out six daily practices for mental resilience and peak performance. In this episode, Lefrak breaks down each step, from framing how you meet the day to the science of why negativity is a protection mechanism, not a character flaw, and explains why willpower will always lose to systems.