That's What I Call Marketing

Mark Kingsley, brand strategist, designer, author and founder of Malcontent, joins That’s What I Call Marketing to discuss his book "Brands in the Age of AI" and why marketers need to think much more deeply about artificial intelligence than prompts, productivity and tools.

Mark’s central argument is that AI is not simply a tool, it is a condition, an environment that is already changing how we work, create, build brands and relate to one another. This conversation explores what that means for brand strategy, creativity, marketing careers and the relationship between companies and customers.

Rather than offering another AI how-to guide that could be outdated within months, Mark draws on history, philosophy, psychology, design and technology to understand where AI fits into a much longer story of technological change.

In this episode, we cover:
– What the Jacquard loom, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and even *Frankenstein* can teach us about today’s AI debate
– AI-driven job losses, automation and the continued commoditisation of creative and knowledge work
– Why removing junior-level “donkey work” could create a serious skills and judgement problem for agencies, marketers and professional services
– Brian Eno’s idea of “scenius” and why creativity is rarely the product of a lone genius
– Agentic AI, B2A2C commerce and what happens when AI agents begin making purchasing decisions
– Why brands could use AI to move beyond transactions towards deeper relationships with people
– Why human discernment could become more valuable as AI becomes more capable
– The danger of treating AI primarily as another system for extracting efficiency and profit
– How AI might instead be used to support human flourishing

One of the most important questions running through the conversation is what happens to expertise when AI starts doing the work through which people traditionally learned their craft.

We also explore what AI means for brands themselves. If brands genuinely want relationships rather than simply transactions, Mark argues AI could help companies recognise people as individuals and members of communities rather than merely customers to extract value from.

A useful listen for marketers interested in AI in marketing, brand strategy, creativity, marketing leadership, agentic AI, synthetic research, the future of work, customer experience and the changing role of human judgement.

02:32 Why this is not another AI how-to book
04:36 “AI is not a tool, it’s a condition”
05:43 Technology, Heidegger and what technology reveals
07:38 Is AI already changing society at scale?
08:01 Alan Turing and the history of machine intelligence
09:02 Jacquard looms, the Luddites and automation
11:04 AI layoffs and the economics of replacing people
13:36 AI infrastructure and removing barriers
19:13 Photography, creativity and resistance to new technology
20:18 Why great photographers and creatives still matter
21:24 Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies
25:18 Agentic AI and B2A2C commerce
26:00 AI personas and purchasing agents
27:02 Tokenisation and the “semiotic gap” between humans and agents
30:48 Why Mark is disappointed by the adversarial AI debate
34:13 What *Brands in the Age of AI* ultimately asks brands to reconsider

This episode is brought to you by Tracksuit the always-on brand tracking platform for clients and agencies.

Find out more: https://www.gotracksuit.com

More from That’s What I Call Marketing

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.

Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.

Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Meghan Gendelman, CMO, B2B at Canva, joins That’s What I Call Marketing to discuss B2B marketing, enterprise growth, building demand and how Canva is taking a hugely successful product-led business further into the enterprise. This conversation gets into what building a B2B growth engine actually requires: understanding customers, combining product-led and sales-led growth, building brand before buyers enter the market, using data properly and working out where AI genuinely adds value.

In this episode, we cover:
– Why Meghan believes B2B marketing is anything but boring, particularly when you are dealing with complex buying committees, long consideration periods and multiple decision-makers
– Why customer insight still matters more than tools, including Meghan’s experience of using AI to scale content for GEO and discovering that faster content without anything new or useful simply didn’t work
– How brand, customer entry points and buying signals help marketers influence customers long before they reach a website or speak to sales
– Why Meghan believes every good marketer needs to become comfortable with data, pipeline and the commercial numbers behind the business
– How Canva is thinking about AI, LLMs, design, brand governance and integrations with platforms including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini
– What Meghan learned from more than a decade at Salesforce, her time at DocuSign and the process that led her to become Canva’s first B2B CMO
– How she leads global marketing teams through clear values, trust, vulnerability and knowing the difference between “smoke” and “fire”

We also discuss the changing B2B buying journey, why much of the decision can happen before a buyer identifies themselves, the role of brand in demand generation and why B2B and B2C marketing are becoming less distinct than marketers sometimes assume.
A useful listen for marketers interested in B2B marketing, enterprise marketing, product-led growth, demand generation, brand building, AI in marketing, customer insight, sales and marketing, marketing leadership and commercial growth.

02:12 Meghan’s career across Salesforce, DocuSign and Canva
03:03 Why everything starts with the customer
05:44 The AI and GEO content experiment that failed
07:18 Why B2B marketing is not boring
10:30 Leading global marketing teams through values and trust
11:41 Smoke, fire and knowing when leaders need to get involved
12:47 Why Meghan joined Canva
14:46 Canva’s 30–40 hour B2B marketing interview challenge
16:15 Taking Canva from product-led growth into enterprise
17:04 Product-led growth versus sales-led growth
19:47 How B2B buying decisions are changing
22:08 Why every marketer needs to understand data
23:13 Meghan’s Monday morning pipeline ritual
24:21 Learning from other marketing leaders
25:00 Remote work, offices and building global teams
27:39 Why EMEA is not one market
28:40 Keeping Canva simple as the platform expands
29:11 Canva as an AI-powered design platform
30:27 Canva, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the LLM ecosystem
31:47 Building Canva’s B2B and enterprise brand

About Meghan Gendelman
B2B at Canva, leading its B2B marketing strategy as Canva continues to grow its enterprise business. Before Canva, Meghan held senior marketing roles at DocuSign and spent more than 12 years at Salesforce across areas including customer success, product marketing, growth marketing, field marketing, demand generation and regional marketing leadership.

This episode was recorded as part of the That’s What I Call Marketing Cannes Sessions and produced in partnership with The Digital Voice.
The Digital Voice: https://www.thedigitalvoice.co.uk/
That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.
Find more episodes at:
https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natasha Wallace, Chief Solutions Officer for Strategy, Planning and AI at Jellyfish, joins That’s What I Call Marketing to discuss how brands can become more visible and understandable to AI without sacrificing creativity, emotion or distinctiveness.

This episode explains how marketers should approach the growing challenge of serving two audiences at once: humans, who respond to stories, feelings and ideas, and AI models, which rely on clear signals, context, trust and specificity.

In this episode, we cover:
– Why Jellyfish’s research found almost no correlation between how humans and AI models judge creative work
– What “brand flattening” means and why marketers should resist making everything rational and functional
– How to make a brand legible to large language models without weakening its creativity
– Why brand trust, distinctive assets and consumer consensus still influence AI recommendations
– The role of YouTube, Reddit, creators, ecommerce and digital PR in shaping model perception
– Why paid, owned and earned media need to work together in an AI-led discovery environment

Natasha also explains Jellyfish’s concept of the “brand echo”: the conversation, reaction and community created around a brand, even when the original activity is not directly visible to an AI model.

The practical message is not that marketers need to abandon the fundamentals. It is that audience strategy, brand positioning, content, media and measurement need to work together more closely. The brands most likely to succeed will be clear enough for machines to understand and interesting enough for people to care about.

A useful listen for marketers interested in AI in marketing, GEO, brand strategy, creativity, content strategy, advertising effectiveness and the future of search and discovery.

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.

Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.

Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com

**Timestamps**

00:00 Why marketers must not flatten their brands for AI
00:39 Introducing Natasha Wallace of Jellyfish
02:04 Natasha’s career across digital, media and emerging technology
03:35 Why AI feels different from previous industry shifts
05:23 Working globally with Heineken and major sports properties
07:05 Why Natasha joined Jellyfish
09:00 Bringing media, content, creative and AI strategy together
12:32 What humans and AI models see in award-winning advertising
15:31 The danger of brand flattening
16:36 How the “brand echo” influences AI models
17:35 Why brand trust and distinctive assets still matter
20:21 Why YouTube is frequently cited by large language models
22:28 How marketers should prioritise their AI and GEO activity
24:46 Leading and lagging indicators for AI visibility
26:01 The platforms and voices that shape model perception
27:27 Borrowed credibility, belonging and long-term brand associations
30:05 Testing creative work without making it formulaic
32:25 Why AI should strengthen human thinking, not replace it

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.
Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
This Cannes Sessions episode is produced in partnership with The Digital Voice.
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Booth, Chief Brand and Creative Officer at Ancient + Brave, and Leanne Tomasevic, Partnerships and Strategy Director at Electric Twin, examine fear-based wellness advertising, synthetic audience research and the human consequences of marketing built around insecurity. Using the Electric Twin platform live during the conversation, we test real wellness advertisements with synthetic audiences and explore how people respond to messages about ageing, attractiveness, sleep, cellulite and female confidence. The results raise an important question for marketers: are we measuring the commercial value of a sale while ignoring what the advertising costs the person on the other side?
In this episode, we cover:
– How wellness brands use fear of ageing, shame and insecurity to attract attention
– What women and men really think about fear-based wellness advertising
– How synthetic audiences allow marketers to test advertising reactions in seconds
– Why scientific language can make weak or misleading claims feel more credible
– How performance algorithms can reward increasingly negative advertising
– The tension between short-term conversion and long-term brand integrity
– Why marketers should consider the cultural and emotional impact of their work

Advertising that sells through fear can leave vulnerable consumers feeling worse, even when it produces a conversion. Leanne demonstrates how Electric Twin creates digital replicas of real audiences, allowing marketers to run surveys, discussions and message testing with a reported average accuracy of 92%. As brands produce hundreds or even thousands of digital assets, marketers can become focused on feeding the algorithm rather than considering how each message affects the person seeing it. A critical listen for marketers interested in brand strategy, wellness marketing, synthetic research, AI in marketing, advertising ethics, consumer insight, marketing effectiveness, performance marketing and responsible brand building.
Timestamps

00:43 Modern wellness advertising and real consumer reactions
03:17 How Electric Twin’s synthetic audience platform works
04:58 Sarah Booth on Ancient + Brave and female confidence
06:25 Leanne Vic explains synthetic audiences
08:17 Why wellness advertising increasingly sells through fear
09:45 Testing a “fear of getting old” advertisement
13:14 How fear-based advertising makes women feel
14:49 Testing the “science of beauty sleep”
18:19 Would consumers actually click on the advertisement?
19:31 The regulatory challenge of digital wellness advertising
21:17 How algorithms create an advertising arms race
22:36 What marketers need to understand about cultural influence
24:00 Why designers think differently about human impact
25:00 Which brands represent female bravery?
27:12 What would make women feel braver?
29:00 Testing cellulite advertising with men
32:00 Can better evidence rescue a damaging advertisement?
34:22 What men think about the way women are marketed to
35:00 Testing a long-form menopause supplement advertisement
36:10 “Dangling hope in front of someone in pain”
36:37 Can platforms make their algorithms more positive?
37:00 Competing without using fear or shame
39:17 The responsibility marketers have for their work

This episode is in partnership with Electric Twin. Electric Twin is a synthetic audience platform that helps brands, marketers, product teams and insight professionals understand audiences, test ideas and explore consumer reactions in seconds.
Find out more at: https://www.electrictwin.com

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.
Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Singles on That’s What I Call Marketing, Conor Byrne is joined by Bella and Ed from Tracksuit to unpack the biggest marketing stories right now using brand tracking data. They dive into the AI brand wars between ChatGPT/OpenAI and Claude/Anthropic, including how Super Bowl advertising impacted awareness and consideration, and discuss how people use each tool for work vs personal life. The team shares Tracksuit’s acquisition of Hall, a Sydney startup that measures how brands show up in AI answers, helping marketers understand AI discoverability and sentiment. They also revisit American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney campaign one year on (awareness gains vs declines in consideration and investigation), break down Norwegian Air’s playful British Airways newsjacking around Norway’s World Cup momentum, and explore Carlsberg’s revival of the “If Carlsberg Did…” platform and what it could mean for brand funnel performance.

01:05 Today’s Marketing Hot Topics
02:11 AI Brand Wars Data
05:27 Who Uses Claude vs ChatGPT
07:52 AI Use Cases and Model Fatigue
12:54 Tracking AI Visibility
17:31 American Eagle One Year Later
21:44 BA vs Norwegian Newsjacking
26:44 Carlsberg Revives Classic Platform

Check out tracksuit
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.