Andrew Knowles, Neil Shoebridge and Sam Somers of SKMG have returned from Adweek NY and have some (many) thoughts. And before you ask, we didn’t pay them for the Cairns Crocodiles plug.
Al Roker is a guy who made his career talking about the weather, so when he opened his Advertising Week New York session by announcing it was 107 degrees in the room, no one blinked an eye.
Advertising Week’s home this year was an old shopping mall on West 33rd Street, where the air conditioning was erratic, queues snaked through the corridors and some people were turned away at the door trying to get into sessions. The organisers should spend some time studying Cairns Crocs.
Most conversations we had between sessions reinforced the theory that Advertising Week is really an adtech tradeshow now, meaning it was no surprise that adtech subjects gave us the most interesting sessions: TikTok launched new shopping tools and everyone had an “agentic roadmap”.
Perhaps the greatest insight in this space came not from what was on stage but who was in the audience. Near every session we went to that displayed some configuration of AI and “customer”, “sales”, “efficiency” was oversubscribed; one of the least attended sessions of the week covered AI risk management. From our observation across the week this appears to be the part the industry is still happy to gloss over. Mike Conway, a field CTO from Ocient who works with measurement and data companies, asked the room to picture an AI agent acting on a pixel that fires twice at 2am. By 9am it’s made thousands of decisions and the client wants to know why. Could your business rebuild the reasoning in under an hour? “You can ask a human why they made a decision,” he said. “But with an agent, the only witness they have is the data.”
The industry seems more focused on what AI might do to creativity and to consumers than on what it’s already doing inside its own businesses. GWI opened one of the week’s Gen Z panels with a survey of 2,000 marketers and insights professionals. About 80% say AI helps them understand audiences faster and about as many already use it to make decisions. Almost the same proportion have had AI findings that were inaccurate, out of date or built on stereotypes. Only a third regularly check what their tools tell them. That’s a huge white space in proactive issues management that marketers and leaders need to take seriously now.
Day two’s sessions kept coming back to understanding consumers, creating communities, authenticity, magic and getting close to the customer. Gen Z came up on at least four panels without a single Gen Zer on any of them. Classic.
Sponsors had a big say in the program, rumour around the grounds is that every session is paid for, which meant most sessions sold more than they taught. A session billed as a guide to always-on sport marketing turned out to be a sales pitch for Disney Advertising and The Trade Desk, a discussion about “next-gen climate story telling” was a pitch to fund distribution of a movie that had been made. It was not ideal.
Down the road at the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit on Times Square, the conversation was different, and the difference was simple. The marketers with something worth hearing had asked their audience before they opened their mouths.
Mazda North America’s Emily Rutt said turning up in someone else’s community is like arriving at a dinner party: “You don’t show up, you don’t change the music, sit at the table, and start talking about yourself.” So when Reddit started arguing about the redesigned CX-5, Mazda got the moderators’ permission and sent in three of its product experts to take questions from fans and critics alike. They answered the hard questions along with the friendly ones.
The same instinct shaped who brands put in front of their fans. Smirnoff’s Jose Velez said Troye Sivan was a tough pitch to executives who didn’t know who he was. “If you don’t know him, we’re doing things right,” he said. Smirnoff made Sivan its Chief Vibes Officer and invited his fans into the creative process. Chipotle’s Fernando Machado, nearly 30 years into his career, admitted his first reaction to a proposed Salish Matter partnership was “Who is that?” His team knew she was one of Gen Alpha’s biggest creators and he had the sense to listen.
None of those brands got there quickly or without giving up some control. JPMorgan Chase’s Danelsy Medrano had an answer for anyone who thinks moving slowly is a luxury when culture moves in hours: the brands that win at speed are “successful because they’ve done the slow work first”.
One trend we picked up on in New York is the in-housing of creators, that is, brands bringing a creator into the business in a purpose-built role. It’s still an experiment and it could go really right or really wrong, depending on how the company treats it and who is being hired. But we certainly saw it at its best.
Blenders Eyewear made Jordan Howlett, who has more than 50 million followers across platforms, its chief content officer this year. Chief executive Jack Gray said he needed a partner “that is going to teach our team”. That meant trusting Howlett when his instincts made no sense to people inside the business, like skipping the big launch media release to build on a store associate’s video. The associate’s post drew two million views and Howlett’s reaction video drew 10 million.
Howlett called himself “a humble visitor” in Gray’s world and said treating the job as a stepping stone would be “an immense disservice”. Blenders’ design director is now working on “Jordan proof” glasses, built to survive a man who throws them at walls on camera.
Marketing Brew counted a run of creator titles this year, including T-Mobile making the comedian Druski its “chief switching officer” and the candy maker Katjes naming Jake Shane its chief creative officer. At the AI start-up Cluely, co-founder Roy Lee has said there are only two jobs: building the product or making it go viral.
Gray said a lot of creators have asked to be his “chief blank officer”. He’s turned them down. Where these roles work, the brand values what the creator can teach its people as much as the name on the media release. That takes an executive willing to admit what they don’t know. Plenty of leaders can pull the metrics on a younger audience, but fewer can tell you why something takes off on social.
A few brands are already taking the idea across the business. Machado wanted every Chipotle touchpoint to feel more like its social channels, which are run by a team he admits knows things he doesn’t. So Chipotle trained 100 creators in its kitchens and cut its new national TV campaign from almost 400 hours of their phone footage.
At Brand Innovators, Dr Marcus Collins argued that a company’s ability to engage audiences depends on how well it engages its own people, because “the front stage is only as good as the backstage”. Good seeds, he said, don’t produce fruit in bad soil.
For those of us in earned media, that makes internal comms a commercial job. Staff can be a brand’s most believable advocates. Getting them aligned on the story and then letting them tell it in their own words unlocks real revenue. The brands mobilising their people now will have a head start on the ones still treating staff as an audience for the all-staff email.
Before you write the next brief, deck or media release, find three of the people it’s meant for. Ask them what would change for them if it worked and what they’d call it. Then build your first line from their answers, in their words.
And if you’re putting together a panel on Gen Z, invite at least one.
