Where this chief discoverability officer sees marketers getting audiences wrong

Heather Physioc, chief discoverability officer at VML, is set to speak at the upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to understand what marketers are still missing when it comes to sophisticated targeting and the danger of the content velocity trap.

What do you think most marketers get wrong in their creative strategy today?

Marketers have never been better at finding the right people, yet we still too often put ourselves at the center instead of them. We invest enormous sophistication in targeting, placement, and optimization, then deliver advertising built around what the brand wants to say rather than what would be useful, interesting, or meaningful to the person encountering it. Reaching someone isn’t the same as serving them.

Where do you see the biggest gap between how marketers think audiences behave and how they actually behave?

Marketers still tend to organize advertising around channels and campaigns, while audiences organize their behavior around needs, questions, and curiosities. People don’t move neatly through a funnel or distinguish between organic, social, earned, and other channels. They move fluidly among search engines, AI assistants, social platforms, reviews, retailer sites, and online communities, often revisiting the same decision from several directions.

Many marketers think they’re designing a journey for audiences, but audiences are assembling their own journeys. It’s our job to help them accomplish what they’re trying to do, not just tell them what we’re trying to say.

The Discoverability group at VML serves more than 70 enterprise brands across verticals and globally. What’s a bet you made when working with a client in the last few years that on paper the data said was wrong, and how did it actually turn out?

I don’t typically bet against data so much as push back on incomplete views or inaccurate readings of it. Search data can tell us what people actively seek. Social listening reveals what people are willing to say publicly. Emerging LLM prompt tools offer an early, still quite squishy view of how people may use AI to explore needs and decisions. Any one source alone produces a fragmented picture of who we are trying to reach and what they need.

The bet we’ve made is to go deeper and combine those points of view, even when one dataset alone does not appear to justify the opportunity. Time and time again, the fuller picture has revealed customer needs that a channel-by-channel analysis would have missed. The data wasn’t necessarily wrong; the view of the customer was incomplete.

Five years from now, what’s the marketing “best practice” of today that you think we’ll all look back on and cringe at?

We will cringe at the idea that “content velocity” meant publishing as much as possible.

Generative AI has made content production nearly frictionless, but it has also made it dramatically easier to create thin, duplicative information that doesn’t need to exist. Brands are flooding the internet with synthetic sameness: more pages, more words, and very little additional value.

The brands that win will not be the ones that produce the most content, but who create the clearest, most authoritative, and most retrievable information, supported by demonstrable expertise, verifiable sources, traceable claims, and human accountability. In a web crowded with synthetic content, the advantage will be information that is easy to find, easy to verify, and easy to trust.

Name one brand or organization that’s putting out advertising you’re regularly jealous of. What makes it so good?

The Home Depot, although what makes me jealous isn’t any single advertising campaign. It’s the discoverability ecosystem the brand has built. The Home Depot understands that customers aren’t just shopping for drills, lumber, and mulch. They’re trying to hang a shelf, build a deck, or revive a lawn. They’re doing a job that Home Depot can help them do.

Wherever those needs emerge, the brand is consistently present and useful with how-to videos, buying guides, calculators, product comparisons, rich shopping listings, local inventory, customer reviews, and expert advice. Each touchpoint creates another doorway into the brand. A question can lead to a video, a video to the right product, and the product to a nearby store or service. The Home Depot doesn’t wait for people to visit its website or interrupt them with a campaign. Instead, the brand helps them make progress across the discovery journey and naturally draws them into its ecosystem. I love that holistic, consistent customer experience.

The summit’s themes are insights, intuition, and integration. Which of those three is the most underrated right now—and which one are marketers leaning on too much?

I love this theme, because integration just got way more important with the rise of AI search and LLM-driven discovery. As an industry, marketers have talked about integration as a “best practice” for ages, but rarely do brands successfully execute on it. Now, that integration and corroboration is a condition for being retrieved and returned at all. It’s just not enough to say we are “integrated” in planning documents; we have to actually behave that way in the market. These LLMs synthesize signals from across the web—we’re talking websites, reviews, social posts, product pages, PR coverage, forums, videos, and structured data, anything they can find—to filter information and construct answers. That makes coordination and corroboration across channels essential. We can’t keep treating channels as separate reporting silos. We need to assemble a fuller, multi-perspective picture of customer needs and use cases. Every expression of the brand needs to contribute to a shared understanding that machines and humans can both reliably interpret and cross-check.