Coworking with Brian Kotlyar

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

Brian Kotlyar is CMO of Hightouch, a customer data platform. He was previously SVP of marketing at New Relic. He has also worked at B2B companies like Sprinklr and Intercom.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? You know when you get a really good email in your inbox or ad in your feed? And you immediately click it and think about buying something? We help companies make and send more of the good ones and less of the bad ones.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Most recently, we did a fun airport takeover in Las Vegas to talk about how Hightouch can help you do “brilliant marketing with a little help from your agents.” It’s just so fun to come up with contextual advertising. Probably the best copy line we came up with was, “Launch an ad campaign before baggage claim,” which ran above the escalators en route to baggage claim. I just love exploring the interaction between physical space and your ad copy/creative.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I’ve always gotten a kick out of Visit Oslo’s self-deprecating campaign. It’s my kind of humor and a super effective ad. Plus, I’ve spent some time in Scandinavia, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The ad worked on me!

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I’m an avid but also terrible vegetable gardener. My hours-of-effort-to-tomatoes-actually-eaten ratio is appalling.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I think we’re on the brink of seeing how AI tooling can bring a lot more creativity, copy excellence, and just generally whimsy, fun, and creativity to what I call “hardworking” ad creative—you know, the day-to-day digital stuff that every brand runs, but very few really put a huge amount of creative calories into. AI is letting us all bring a lot more to bear on those ads, and I think the quality is going to go up dramatically in the months and years to come.

I’m least excited about the way that internet discourse (which wasn’t great to begin with) is increasingly just lightly edited AI responses interacting with lightly edited AI posts and commentary. This stuff masquerading as “organic” conversation among people, brands, and influencers is raising the bar so much on media literacy and makes standing out as a brand more difficult by the day.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? Check out my friend Neville Medhora—he runs a great free resource I use all the time to get marketing ideas called Swipefile, and he posts great copywriting and marketing insights at @NevMed on X. He’s worth a follow!