Coworking with Amanda Bailey

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Amanda Bailey is chief client officer of VML. She’s also worked at IN Marketing and Saatchi & Saatchi X.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I’m part strategic advisor helping brand marketers accelerate growth, part founder setting vision for where commerce is going, part business owner accountable to our P&L, and part leader shaping teams built for what’s next. It’s a lot of hats, but the throughline is shaping what’s next in how brands connect with their customers and helping others do the same.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Two VML campaigns come to mind because together they show what we do best. Oreo Codes took an insight hiding in plain sight—milk barcodes look like stacked Oreos—and turned it into a commerce experience that’s now a multiyear platform—we’ve since found Oreos in website menus, crosswalks, everywhere. Wendy’s is a partnership we’ve built over a decade, from its Fortnite work that won the first-ever Social & Influencer Grand Prix at Cannes to a Facebook strategy so effective Meta adopted it as their Gen Z best practice. What connects them: Culture and commerce aren’t separate disciplines at VML. The best work lives at the intersection—creative that’s built to drive business, not just win awards.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I have genuine fangirl energy for founders. I’m up at 5am most mornings working out to a founders podcast. I’ll dive deep into how Sara Blakely bootstrapped Spanx, how Jamie Kern Lima built IT Cosmetics and sold it for a billion dollars, or Mark Cuban’s approach to investing and growing companies with the same enthusiasm most people reserve for sports teams. Marketing is interesting to me, but how people grow things from nothing—that’s what I find inspiring.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I’m most optimistic about agentic commerce—the idea that AI won’t just help people find products but will actually shop for them. It’s going to fundamentally reshape how brands build consideration and loyalty, and the companies figuring that out now will have a massive advantage.

I’m least optimistic about everyone racing to “do AI” without doing the foundational work. Brands are adding AI to their roadmaps and press releases, but most haven’t made themselves machine-readable, haven’t structured their product data, haven’t thought about how to show up where AI actually learns. The gap between the conversation and the execution is widening.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? Aspire with Emma Grede. She’s built some of the most culturally relevant brands of the last decade (Good American, Skims) while raising four kids, and the podcast is less about marketing tactics and more about how successful people actually think and operate—habits, mindset, what drives them. That resonates with where I am right now. The best marketing comes from companies that have their fundamentals right—vision, people, product—and Emma talks about all of it with zero pretense.