Marketing Trends

Every CMO is being told to replace people with AI agents as fast as possible. Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive, is doing some of that — and deliberately refusing to do other parts of it. The line she's drawn between the two is the most useful rubric we've heard in months.

Attentive runs SMS, email, push, and RCS for thousands of consumer brands — a category where the temptation to automate everything is maximum. But Keri's strongest customer-loyalty moment last year wasn't an AI agent. It was a single text from a real human after a graduation dress arrived without its matching belt. 'I will buy a million more things from them.'

This episode is the rubric: where AI is unlocking near-100% revenue lifts, where iOS 26 just quietly killed 80% of your text marketing, and the customer moment no agent count can replace.

What you'll learn

• Why brands using AI hands-off-the-wheel are seeing near 100% revenue lift — and the two customers proving it

• How iOS 26 broke text marketing for 80%+ of devices, and the 2Tap opt-in fix most brands don't know about

• The personalization rubric that gets 91% of consumers to say yes

• The metric CFOs are asking marketing leaders about right now instead of CAC

• The one customer moment that no AI agent can replicate — and why it's the only outcome that matters

Connect

Keri McGhee on LinkedIn

Attentive

Chapters

0:00 Stop Selling AI, Start Proving Outcomes

1:16 What Changed in AI Marketing This Year

2:03 Why 90% of CMOs Experiment, But Few Scale

5:29 Why Attentive Doesn’t Lead With “AI” Anymore

6:32 Channel Affinity: Fewer Messages, Better Revenue

8:06 100% Revenue Lift

10:55 Identity AI and the Send-Time Unlock

12:34 The Best Practice Killing Your Deliverability

14:16 iOS 26 and the New Rules for Text Marketing

15:26 Why 2Tap Matters for SMS Consent

17:41 LLM Discovery, GEO, and the New Search Funnel

21:23 Why Consumers Distrust AI But Use It to Shop

24:22 The Tuckernuck Story: When AI Still Feels Personal

28:27 Why CMOs Have to Get Their Hands Dirty

32:14 The KPI Replacing CAC

34:21 Why Martech Is Consolidating Again

36:31 How to Spot Real AI vs. Rebranded AI

38:00 Stop Counting Agents. Measure the Experience.

43:10 The Skill AI Can Quietly Take From You

44:24 How Brands Should Prep for BFCM

46:38 Lightning Round: Trends, Skills, and Frameworks

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most CMOs think personalization requires complex AI and endless customer segments. Elizabeth Maxson proves otherwise.

She breaks down actionable personalization strategies — from geo-tagging that drove a 51% lift in event attendance to playful homepage tricks that captured marketers' attention and boosted engagement.

The takeaway: Stop overcomplicating personalization. Start with big buckets and simple, contextual changes.

Chapters

00:00 - Why Personalization Should Be Simple

00:32 - First-Time vs Returning vs Current Customers

01:07 - Marketer vs Developer Homepages

03:01 - Geo-Tagging: +51% Attendance

04:28 - The Big Buckets Approach

05:28 - The Lorem Ipsum Attention Hack

06:22 - Ruggable Cat vs Dog Personalization

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when your next customer isn't even human?

Chris Koehler is the CMO of Twilio, and his 2026 marketing plan lasted exactly one month before AI agents forced him to rethink everything. In this conversation, Chris gets real about why planning horizons have collapsed from years to weeks, what happens when AI agents — not humans — are doing the buying, and why brand might matter MORE in an AI-driven world, not less.

Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, a $5B+ customer engagement platform. Previously, he led marketing at Box and helped build the analytics engine at Adobe.

 

Key takeaways:

• Why using AI to speed up bad processes is the wrong move — you need to reimagine them entirely

• The agent buying continuum: SEO → AEO → human-to-agent → agent-to-agent

• Why brand awareness becomes MORE critical when agents do the discovery

• The 'frozen food vs pizza' framework for the future of software

• How to stop feeling paralyzed: the quadrant exercise he uses to prioritize AI initiatives

 

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ckoehler/

Learn more: twilio.com

 

Chapters:

00:00 Meet Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio

01:44 The Healthy Tension Between IT and Marketing

02:44 Planning in Weeks, Not Quarters

04:40 The Rise of Asynchronous AI Work

07:22 Unlearning 30 Years of Marketing

11:37 Frozen Food vs Pizza: The Future of Software

14:07 Content Scarcity to Content Abundance

15:51 Could AI Agents Fix the Privacy Problem?

17:11 The Agent Buying Continuum

22:12 The Tsunami Most People Can't See

24:40 How to Get Embedded in LLM Recommendations

26:33 Does Brand Matter When Agents Are Buying?

31:01 Measuring Success When You Can't Track Anything

33:12 The AI Agent Webinar Experiment

36:44 What Events Look Like in 2029

42:48 How Chris Curates AI Intel Daily

46:22 Advice for Paralyzed CMOs

49:01 Lightning Round

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Merriam-Webster named "slop" the 2025 word of the year - and it explains everything about where AI-generated content is heading.

Elizabeth Maxson, CMO of Contentful, reveals the uncomfortable truth about AI adoption: 96% of CMOs say it's a top priority, but only 65% are making meaningful investments. The gap between enthusiasm and execution is costing teams momentum.

She breaks down research conducted with The Atlantic, surveying 425 global marketing leaders. The findings expose why teams are stuck in experimentation mode, what top performers do differently, and why soft skills matter more than prompt engineering.

We explore evidence-based creativity, the rise of the full-stack marketer, and simple personalization strategies that actually move the needle - including the geo-tagging change that increased event attendance by 51% and the Lorem Ipsum homepage trick that drove 250% more engagement.

If you're tired of tools that promise speed but deliver sameness, this episode is your blueprint for moving from workslop to real strategy.

 

Chapters:

00:00 The Volume Trap: More Content Doesn't Equal Better Content

01:27 The Optimism-Execution Gap: Why CMOs Aren't Investing

10:05 AI Slop: When You Recognize Your Own ChatGPT Output

13:04 The Homepage Login Discovery

15:50 Why Simple Geo-Tagging Works

18:34 The Lorem Ipsum Homepage Experiment

19:29 Ruggable's Cat People vs. Dog People Strategy

28:00 The NASCAR Slide That Almost Went Wrong

31:17 Hiring Full Stack Marketers: Soft Skills Over Hard Skills

43:00 Course Correction Year: Two Pieces of Homework

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Best practices told you to optimize reputation across all 10,000 locations equally—but granular competitive data just revealed that 7,000 of those stores don't need it, and you're wasting millions on the wrong priorities. The era of broad-based marketing is over.

Michael Walrath (CEO & Founder of Yext) reveals why we're entering a "post-best-practice world" where context trumps everything. From the 10,000 taco restaurant problem (why you're overspending on 7,000 stores that don't need help), to why pay-to-play platforms like Forrester and Gartner face disruption, to how ChatGPT's memory will match insurance agents to customers based on shared interests like golf—without anyone typing a single preference.

You'll learn why software and services are blending (Palantir trades at 105x revenue for this reason), why store managers need localized control instead of centralized brand police, and how AI context windows are fundamentally shifting from generic queries to completely bespoke recommendations. This is the playbook for moving beyond one-size-fits-all tactics into hyper-personalized optimization at scale.

 

Chapters:

00:00 Is "Content Everywhere" Already Outdated?

01:10 The 10,000 Taco Problem: Why Best Practices Waste Millions

04:07 Will Forrester, Gartner & G2 Survive the AI Era?

07:30 Context is Everything: The Lunch Example That Explains AI's Future 

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Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.