Coworking with Justine Frostad

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

Justine Frostad is CMO of Cognitiv, an AI advertising company. She has also worked at Sightly and The Exchange Lab.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? One of my favorite projects was our “Meet Edna” campaign. We launched it at Advertising Week New York last year as a way to show, not just say, what our deep learning can do. When marketing AI, it feels particularly important to actually use it and to be transparent about that choice. Working with our agency, Manual Labor, we intentionally moved away from photorealism and leaned into a painterly, illustrated style. It gave the work more warmth and personality and made it clear these ads were partially AI-generated without trying to hide it.

Edna was the heart of the campaign. She “is afraid of sharks, hates swimming, and is landlocked…but loves a cruise.” That contradiction is the point. People are nuanced, often illogical, and full of signals that don’t neatly line up. For marketers, those edges are where the most valuable, often overlooked audiences live. For me, the project worked because we weren’t just talking about AI, we were showing how it can be used thoughtfully, transparently, and in partnership with human creativity.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Spotify Wrapped is one of the most effective modern marketing platforms and a personal favorite. It takes our listening habits, which are incredibly personal, and turns them into something joyful, shareable, and culturally contagious. Every year, people don’t just consume it, they look forward to it, talk about it, compare it. What’s brilliant is that it makes data feel like identity. It’s not “here’s what you listened to”; it’s “here’s who you were this year.” That’s something I think about a lot in the context of AI and data. When you can translate signals into something that feels human, reflective, even a little emotional, you’re no longer just informing people, you’re connecting with them.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I have a collection of very random hobbies that probably make more sense together than you might think. I play the ukulele (not well, but enthusiastically), I’m on a beach volleyball team every summer, I live for a good canoe ride, and I rarely miss hot yoga on Sundays. I’m also slightly obsessed with making the perfect sandwich; there’s an art to getting the balance just right. They’re all my favorite kind of reset, the kind where you lose track of time, forget your phone exists, and come back a little clearer.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Most optimistic: The shift toward transparency in AI usage. The default has been to hide AI involvement as if audiences are too naive to handle it or would reject the work if they knew, but we’re seeing the opposite. When you’re honest about using AI and why it makes the work better, audiences respect it. This opens up so many creative possibilities because you can lean into what AI does uniquely well, rather than trying to make it imitate human work… AI is most powerful when it’s not pretending to be human.

Least optimistic: the rush toward sameness. With AI making it easier to produce more content, faster, there’s a risk that everything starts to look and sound the same. When everyone has access to similar tools and is optimizing against similar signals, you can end up with a sea of “pretty good” that lacks distinctiveness. Efficiency is important, but marketing isn’t just a volume game, it’s about differentiation… Originality continues to be the real advantage.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I keep coming back to We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle. It’s not a marketing podcast, and that’s exactly why I recommend it. Great marketing is about understanding people at their most honest and complicated. This podcast is a masterclass in nuance, vulnerability, and the kinds of conversations that shape culture long before they show up in a campaign. In my experience, if you want to tell better stories, the best way to start is by listening to people telling the truth.