Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
Inspiring Futures pulls back the curtain on the minds reshaping advertising and marketing today. Host Ed Cotton, former Chief Strategy Officer at Butler Shine and Stern & Partners, engages industry visionaries in raw, unfiltered conversations about their career pivots, creative breakthroughs, and strategic innovations. No canned responses. No PR filters. Just honest insights about navigating the complex world of brands, creativity, and agency life. Each episode delivers actionable wisdom from those who've mastered the craft and aren't afraid to share their failures alongside their successes.
Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
AI and the Marketing Department- Mixtape Partners
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AI and The Marketing Department
For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag, Andy Bateman, and Sarah Lent/
Mixtape is a management consultancy designed specifically for marketers navigating the AI era.
Between them, they've spent careers inside the big agency networks (Omnicom, WPP, IPG, Interbrand, R/GA), led innovation and customer strategy at Deloitte, and sat on the client side as senior marketers and CMOs.
They've been the consultants, they've been the clients, and they've run the agencies.
They started Mixtape because they kept noticing the same thing: most strategy work gets shelved, and the work that actually matters is the work that gets adopted.
In the past year, they spent some time researching what was happening with AI and marketing departments. They spent an hour each with thirty CMOs working across twelve industries.
Their main conclusion is the one nobody wants to say out loud: nobody has figured this out yet. Not the consultancies. Not the holdcos. Not the platforms.
What they did find is a set of moves leading marketers are quietly making while everyone else is still arguing about prompts.
Four core findings...
The customer you're designing for isn't one person anymore. It's three. Almost no marketer interviewed is ready for what that means.
There's a single decision a CMO can make in the next six months that quietly kills their AI transformation before it starts, and most of them are about to make it.
As AI takes over execution, the entire value of human work collapses onto one thing. Companies that aren't training for it are about to discover a capability gap that no amount of AI throughput can fix.
Your brand is now an iceberg. The part everyone's been optimising for is the part above the water.