Why this marketer thinks brands should stop letting dashboards make creative decisions

Blair Pfander, VP of creative at the infant formula brand Bobbie, is set to speak at the upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her about prioritizing raw, emotionally driven content when the legacy playbook said soft lighting and smiling babies would perform best.

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

Most marketers are so terrified of taking a creative risk that they end up making highly efficient, deeply optimized nothing. Most brands are afraid to make the actual bold statement, or their once-bold campaign has been diluted through a million rounds of reviews.

I think a lot of companies are optimizing everything in the creative pipe for the hook in the first 1.5 seconds, but they’re forgetting to build anything worth looking at for the remaining fifteen seconds. If your creative looks like every other user-generated template on the internet, you aren’t building brand equity; you’re just buying real estate. In reality, what stops people in their tracks is making them feel something.

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

Marketers love to build these pristine, perfectly segmented consumer personas like “The Millennial Working Mom” who takes yoga and buys Erewhon. In reality, audiences are messy, if not downright contradictory. That exact same mom might be crying in her car in a Target parking lot at 9p.m. and eating handfuls of stale Goldfish. Consumers, specifically parents in year one, who we’re thinking about every day at Bobbie, are often just trying to get through the day.

If your brand doesn’t meet people in the beautiful, chaotic reality of their actual life, it won’t resonate.

Bobbie has built marketing around its consumers. What’s a bet you made that the data said was wrong, and how did it turn out?

The data, especially if you look at the old-school legacy infant formula playbook, says you shouldn’t talk about the hard parts. It says parents want to see soft lighting, perfectly clean nurseries, and smiling babies.

Early on, we made a bet on raw, authentic, emotionally driven content. We embraced the unseen parts of parenting and feeding: the guilt, the comparison, the late-night Google spirals, the questioning of everything, including yourself, and the difficulty in asking for help.

It wasn’t data, but our intuition as moms ourselves told us that parents desperately need real validation. It turned out to be the ultimate growth lever for Bobbie. When you show a parent their actual life reflected back at them without judgment, you don’t just win a customer—you win a fiercely loyal advocate.

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

I don’t think any of our “best practices” will be relevant five years from now. The pace of innovation and change, not just in the tools we use to create, but where the work goes and how it finds its audience, are changing so quickly that I think it’d be pretty silly for us to cling too tightly to any rule about the “optimized A/B version” of whatever.

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

Oura. They’re one of the few wellness brands that truly understands their audience isn’t one type of person. Their marketing speaks just as authentically to a woman navigating perimenopause as it does to an athlete training for a race as it does to my 74-year-old and very active father (who just bought a ring, by the way).

What I admire even more is how that philosophy extends into the product itself. They don’t assume everyone’s definition of health is optimizing for a marathon or chasing PRs. The advertising feels great because it’s rooted in a genuinely nuanced understanding of the people they’re building for.

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?

Intuition is the most underrated.

I think we have entered an era of data cowardice where marketers refuse to greenlight a creative concept unless a spreadsheet or a dashboard pre-validates it. But data only tells you what worked yesterday. It cannot predict cultural shifts, and it certainly can’t measure soul, or frankly, taste. Sometimes the answer is just as simple as a gut feeling.