Coworking with Shane Norris

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

Shane Norris is head of sales at Fyllo, a contextual targeting platform. He has also worked at M3, Roku, and Funny or Die.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? In a perfect world, advertising should feel less like an interruption and more like a helpful nudge. My job is to make sure the ads you encounter (whether you’re scrolling, watching, or walking through a city) are actually relevant to your interests, not random noise. Every brand is ultimately hoping for a response, whether it’s a purchase, a click, or even just a moment of attention. What I focus on is identifying when and where those responses are most likely to happen. Done right, it makes the experience better for both brands and the people they’re trying to reach.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I’ve worked on some incredibly fun campaigns over the years, but two come to mind that each taught me a core lesson in this business: when you understand what really matters to a client, great work and great results follow. The first was helping a major car brand reach an audience they typically struggled with, out of their usual age demographic. We solved it by writing an Alanis Morissette parody that not only went viral, but actually led to the client expanding the campaign and signing on for another parody song. (Fun fact: to sell the idea internally, I actually had to sing the parody myself. It worked!) The other standout was launching the first-ever branded TV show on Roku for a liquor brand. It was a bold move that pushed creative boundaries and delivered a huge impact.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: On paper, my résumé might look a little all over the place, but there’s actually a through line: curiosity. I’ve taken jobs across different corners of the media world to scratch the itch of learning how advertising really works, from the inside out, across different brands, users, and categories.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? The return to context as a core strategy has been really great to see. It’s getting harder and harder to reach users via addressable means. Meeting audiences within relevant context has always been valuable—and the fact that it can be super-charged with things like Natural Language Processing and sequential messaging strategies now make it even more powerful than ever.

I am more weary towards the overuse of automation and AI without any human oversight. Don’t get me wrong, AI has some incredible applications, and we use it very strategically at Fyllo. But not everything needs to be automated. Too many teams are stapling AI onto campaigns like it’s a cure-all, when in reality, the best work still comes from people who understand nuance, context, and the audience on a deeper level.

Algorithms might be great at chasing clicks, but they’re not great at solving real business problems. That’s where human insight still makes all the difference.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I try not to get tunnel vision in my career, so while I keep up with marketing trends, I actually get a lot of inspiration from media that isn’t strictly marketing-related. I really enjoy the podcast Better Offline, hosted by Ed Zitron. It’s a sharp, often brutally honest take on the tech and media landscape that cuts through the noise. I also appreciate what Defector and 404 Media are doing. Both were founded by journalists who left legacy media to build something more transparent and audience-first, creating employee-owned companies backed by their most loyal readers. They’re delivering information in fresh, engaging ways (without treating their audiences like data points) and are redefining how content is produced and monetized. For marketers, there’s a lot to learn from that kind of alignment between mission, business model, and audience trust.