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Marketing Brew

Alyssa Meyers

marketingbrew.com

GroupM plans to double its women’s sports spend this year

The WPP agency created a marketplace for women’s sports media inventory ahead of upfronts season, and already has clients including Ally, Google, and Discover signed on.

Jasmine Sheena

How Omnicom is working to make its AI tools more inclusive 

The agency’s analytics shop Annalect is working on improving the data behind its tools. 

Ryan Barwick

A gif of an illustrated computer showing an automated message. 

Agencies are tackling generative AI, but with a little help

From startups to Silicon Valley, Big Tech is helping advertisers use AI.

Employees sitting around conference room desk with whiteboard

Agencies

Kelsey Sutton

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

Lisa Hurst is chief client officer of Amp (Advantage Marketing Partners). She was previously at Upshot, which is now a part of Amp, for more than 20 years.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing?

 I lead teams that create innovative solutions to meet client needs—ideas and activations that enhance brand relevance and influence consumer behavior. This could manifest as a Super Bowl advertisement, a trending TikTok challenge, or even a billboard. At the core of my job is a deep understanding of consumers—sometimes even better than they understand themselves—and finding the best ways to connect with them during meaningful moments.

 One of my favorites is the Nick Offerman “

” campaign for regenerative farming. We took a complex issue—soil health and cover crops—and brought it to life through playful storytelling and humor. Nick literally plays the soil, going from tired and worn to renewed, and that surprise, combined with education, made it stick. It’s the kind of creative work that teaches, entertains, and inspires—and it also went viral!

” Super Bowl spot from 2024. It was such a smart use of the moment—taking the biggest ad stage of the year and turning it into something people could immediately interact with. They hid a promo code in the commercial and offered to deliver everything advertised during the game—cars, snacks, even mayo. To me, it blurred the line between awareness and conversion in a really clever way. I think that’s where we’re headed: more work that fuses brand-building with commerce creative. It wasn’t just entertaining; it gave people a reason to engage immediately.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile:

 I began my career in research and development at Procter & Gamble, leveraging my degree in biology. It wasn’t a typical path to advertising, but I developed a passion for transforming consumer insights into creative ideas. This combination of science and storytelling has been the foundation of my career.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? 

I am optimistic about the merging of brand-building and commerce, where creative work not only entertains but also drives immediate action. However, I am least optimistic about the dominance of performance metrics. Overly focusing on clicks and conversions can risk stifling bold, long-term creative ideas.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend?

 with Scott Galloway. He’s provocative, sharp, and unafraid to take a strong stance. I don’t always agree with him—and that’s the point. He makes you think differently about business, marketing, and culture. His perspective goes well beyond advertising, which is part of what makes it so valuable.

Coworking with Lisa Hurst

She’s chief client officer, Amp. 

Jennimai Nguyen

There’s nothing unwell about leading a media company, a beverage brand, and an ad agency—unless, of course, Alex Cooper is the one doing it.

Earlier this month, the podcast host and internet personality announced Unwell Creative Agency, a new advertising outfit offering services like creating content, developing campaigns, and strategizing events, according to Unwell’s chief brand officer, TJ Marchetti. The agency’s unveiling was announced alongside a multiyear partnership with Google that includes Unwell’s use of Google devices and a new ad for Google Pixel and T-Mobile called “Get Lost.”

Cooper’s not the only well-known entertainment figure to dip into the advertising world in the past few years (see: Kristen Bell’s Dunshire Productions or Ryan Reynolds’s Maximum Effort), but she does straddle an interesting line between full-blown celebrity and internet-native influencer. The company is positioning Cooper’s understanding of her chronically online Gen Z audience as a strength that will allow its work to uniquely cut through the noise. Amid a growing field of celeb-led advertising expertise, the fledgling agency is framing Cooper’s unique perspective as the edge that sets Unwell apart.

“Alex is involved in everything we do. Some people think that, given all of the demands of 

 and being the co-CEO, that she would be a figurehead or something. That’s not the case,” Marchetti told Marketing Brew. “This company is built on that DNA.”

Marchetti told us he believes the marketing funnel and traditional agency approach are “broken,” and that Unwell Creative Agency can help fix it and reach younger audiences that may be wary of other forms of advertisements.

“In this demographic, they don’t really trust brands that can’t relate to them,” he said.

While Marchetti said that Cooper aims to be as hands-on as possible, and Unwell’s first spot with Google stars Cooper, Unwell will create ads that don’t all star Cooper, who recently told the Wall Street Journal that she 

 to be the face of every campaign produced by the agency. Marchetti said each project will require different degrees of Cooper’s involvement, and the agency’s work will carry her approach while relying on a “roster of creatives” to help ideate and produce campaigns.

For brands, working with celebrity-fronted agencies can be one way to cut through in culture. Alyson Griffin, head of marketing at State Farm, said that tapping into a celebrity’s perspective and personal network is a common value proposition that celeb-fronted agencies have approached her with, and she personally appreciates when a celebrity has “skin in the game” and works directly on a campaign. The insurance company has previously worked with Reynolds’s Maximum Effort on everything from viral stunts to shifting media spend from linear TV to digital advertising, and Griffin said State Farm has also explored working with other similar agencies.

“They bring this cultural fluency, credibility and relevance, and I think therefore some brands can look at it as the fastest path to a virtual front page of the internet,” Griffin told us. “We don’t do it all the time, but [working with celebrity agencies] will get some interest.”

When State Farm worked with Maximum Effort to place Jake from State Farm 

 of a Philadelphia Eagles game next to Travis and Jason Kelce’s mother, Donna Kelce, Reynolds’s involvement generated its own 

, mostly focused on the virality of the stunt. Griffin said that virality was only made possible because of speed (the whole stunt was developed and executed over a Friday-to-Sunday timeline), and that speed was only possible because of a sense of trust State Farm had already established with the agency—a requirement whether an agency partner is celeb-led or not.

Unwell is similarly looking to establish those trusted relationships with brands, and is aiming to build off of any virality for longer-term results.

“Our agency is about building long-term relationships with brands and helping them build relationships with the audience,” Marchetti said. “It’s not through a one-off. It’s through creative that truly connects.”

As Unwell builds out its client roster, Marchetti said his team is looking to stay selective, and will emphasize its experience in live events and distribution channels as a way to stand out.

Meanwhile, Griffin is keeping an eye on influencers and their advertising offerings, too, particularly as some of them prove adept at building distribution networks around themselves.

“Creative influencers,” she noted, “are like a cultural media ecosystem—much bigger than celebrity.”

Alex Cooper poses with a Google Pixel phone.

What Alex Cooper’s creative agency is bringing to the celebrity advertising world

As celebrity-led agencies continue to proliferate, Cooper’s team is looking to connect with audiences beyond viral moments. 

An Unwell addition: What Alex Cooper’s creative agency is bringing to the celebrity advertising world

Michael Lamp is chief digital and social officer at the agency Hunter, where he has been for nearly two decades.

 I help brands figure out how to make their (often) old business models feel native to a digital audience, blending traditional methods with emerging technologies to meet people where they are online, engage them (first), and sell to them (second).

 The first project that pivoted my career from traditional PR to digital was back in 2009. I’d been with Hunter for one year and was an account executive on the food/bev team working on the Grey Poupon biz at Kraft. Fox News was making news out of President Obama’s burger order (adding Dijon mustard), calling him an elitist and not “of the people.” So we wrote an open letter, riffing on our brand heritage, urging Obama to “pardon” those who believe in free choice when choosing condiments. This was during the primitive days of social and digital, so we developed a microsite and pitched it to the media. The results were great and ranged from 

,” from the 3G rollout of Apple’s iPhone. I love anything that successfully blends utility with entertainment. This built off that tension perfectly, positioning these then-new devices as more than just phones but keys to solving daily problems and on-demand entertainment. The concept of time-shifted anything was still a very premium novelty (like TiVo!), so all of this in one’s pocket was game-changing. And apps propelled this further, showing how they’d easily sustain innovation over time.

 My first “internship” in college was actually the College Program at Walt Disney World. I was very good friends with Pluto and Eeyore (IYKYK), and that’s where I learned the art of IRL animation and honed my early presentation chops.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least?

 Funny enough, both are tied to AI. I’m most optimistic about LLMs and their impact on communications, specifically our ability to drive better discovery of non-paid content (notably earned coverage and earned-on-owned social content). I’m least optimistic about where we are with the generative creative side of AI. The rapid innovation has not been dually met with rapid regulation, and I think creative is the longer-term threat to disinformation than the written word.

Coworking with Michael Lamp 

He’s chief digital and social officer at Hunter.

Katie Hicks

 environmental protections, sustainability in 2025 may feel like it’s largely on the backburner. In the agency world, that may not be the case, according to new findings from Clean Creatives.

Late last month, the activist group released its fifth annual F-List report, which documents the ad and PR agencies working with fossil-fuel companies. This year’s report, which includes data from 2024 and 2025, found that 709 agencies had more than 1,217 contracts with fossil-fuel companies across the industry, while more than 1,500 agencies have pledged to not work with such companies. It’s the first time since the report’s creation that the number of agencies pledging not to work with polluters exceeded the number of agencies working with them.

Fossil Fuel Income Risk Exposure (FFIRE) index

, the group found that public relations firm Edelman was the agency most reliant on fossil-fuel money, with an estimated 5.64% of its revenue coming from fossil-fuel contracts. Clean Creatives supplemented this year’s list with an 

 that calls attention to Edelman, Havas, and WPP, along with other agencies and holding companies that continue to work with fossil-fuel companies.

“Edelman sees this as a pillar of their business in a way that no other agency of their size does,” Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, told us. “It’s extremely short-term [thinking]. Fossil-fuel demand is going to go down—it just will.”

Edelman declined to provide an attributable comment.

We spoke with Meisel about the 2025 F-List, the current state of corporate sustainability, and why he remains hopeful about Clean Creative’s overall mission to divest the industry completely from fossil fuels.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What were your big takeaways from this year’s F-List?

This is the first year that we’ve had a list where the number of agencies that signed the Clean Creatives pledge is actually larger than the number of agencies on the F-List…[Agencies] with fossil-fuel clients aren’t really yet addressing this problem in the way they should, but there’s a lot more people out there who are doing stuff about it.

The thing that really helped put this in perspective for me was the FFIRE index, which is the second half of the F-List this year and is a way to measure the percentage of revenue going into large holding companies from fossil fuels…This is a small portion of the industry that’s doing a lot of harm, and focusing on dealing with it is a great way to start preparing the industry for what is a precarious future.

This year’s F-List reported a 7% YoY increase in fossil-fuel contracts in North America. (Last year’s F-List found a total of 258 contracts in the region; this year, the number was 277.) What did you think about that finding?

It’s noise. The methodology here is finding things that people post about on the internet, and it’s not necessarily an indicator of more or less, it’s just what we were able to find this year. If it indicates anything, it’s an indication of people being more willing to post on the internet about [work with fossil-fuel companies]...I think the 7% is in the “who can really say?” range. I don’t take it as an indicator of anything besides the fact that the number isn’t going down in the way we hope it would.

Do you think US agencies are feeling more inclined to take fossil-fuel business in response to the current political climate?

There’s a big perception gap where we do have this political moment where a government is strongly emphasizing fossil fuels and using their power to promote fossil-fuel production and attack clean energy, but the big picture here is that clean energy is absolutely winning. The amount of capital or investment in clean energy is 

 of fossil fuels…That reality hasn’t fully set in for people because there is this very vocal, visible, pro-fossil-fuel segment of the political class right now that are making it hard to adjust to the future…We’re moving slower than we have to, but the fundamentals, I think, are still strong.

Do you feel like progress is being made in the dark and agencies are perhaps not publicizing sustainability efforts as much?

 that came out that showed global net-zero commitments are still increasing, but it’s definitely the case that sustainability is advancing in a quieter way right now. The biggest challenge is that in the minds of people who are leading large agencies, they’re still on the assumption that fossil fuels equal infinite wealth and money and power. That’s the assumption that I grew up with, that you probably grew up with, but doesn’t reflect economic reality at all. If you’re State Farm and you had to 

 this year because you lost so much money on California wildfires caused by climate change, [sustainability] is not a nice-to-have. It’s essential to have. You have to solve this problem if you want to have a business in 10 years. And I think those realities will become starker and starker to people.

How are you keeping the pressure on big holding companies that seem to be immune to pressure or don’t seem to be budging?

We know Havas lost a fair number of clients from their work with Shell, and four of their agencies 

. It cost them money, and it cost them work, and they’ll lay off employees because of it…. Transparency is important and necessary in a world where things are overheating and spinning out of control rapidly….I don’t think [agencies] are immune at all. I think it’s just a moment that is particularly strategically tough. But you have to plan five years in advance. It doesn’t make sense to only be looking six months in the future and expect to have a business that’s sustainable. You’re going to miss shit. We’re trying to really emphasize that this is essential for long-term growth because the fossil fuels are going to go away, and they’re going to harm your other clients and the business in the process. You can’t only be looking this far in front of your face and expect to keep your employees paid and your business stable.

 on Edelman, which had the highest FFIRE score this year, with some 

, have you seen indicators of certain strategies that seem to be working?

They seem to respond best to direct pressure. Edelman dropped Exxon because of people posting adamantly on the internet for them to drop Exxon, and I think that’s what it really takes with them. There seems to be some strategic or ideological commitment to fossil fuels at the top of the company in a way that is very hard to explain otherwise, and I think that direct reputational risk is what is going to ultimately take its toll.

Are you tracking agencies’ AI usage at all, given its 

We haven’t really been looking at it, mostly because it’s not our specialty. I’d love to, but ultimately fossil-fuel use is 

 of global carbon pollution…Even a campaign [for a fossil-fuel company] with zero AI and zero carbon footprint…is going to do a lot of harm, and that’s the harm that we’re trying to solve.

Have your goals or strategies shifted at Clean Creatives given the political climate and the fact that sustainability is a little bit more hush, hush?

We’re focusing on being a supportive community for people who are still advocating for change. We’re hosting more events in person with the goal of keeping those networks strong and excited and ready to support each other. People forget that the biggest moment of global climate mobilization in human history happened when Donald Trump was president in 2019 during the global climate strikes. The fact that his administration is not interested in climate action does not decrease climate concern among the public. It increases it. There is a question of political momentum here, and it will change, and the people who are thinking ahead to when the wheel turns will be the ones who are most successful…We’re really trying to get people ready for when that momentum shifts.

Have you seen sign-up momentum pick up since Trump took office again?

What are your goals for the rest of the year and into next year?

We think there needs to be a big focus on Edelman’s role at the [COP30] UN climate talks [in November]. The fact that they were hired to lead communications for the global climate talks and have the same person managing the Shell account, managing the COP account, is a huge problem…Edelman is the most climate-conflicted agency that we found in terms of revenue percentage, and that’s something that needs to be front and center when thinking about how to advance climate action in these global forums. You can’t really be working with people who are that conflicted and still expect to have the outcomes that you hope for.

We’re just looking ahead for when this momentum shifts back…The climate is still changing. It is still getting hotter. It is still bad for business, and I don’t think there’s a real future here for agencies that don’t take that into account. We’re just preparing people for when the time to move is right.

Update 10/16/2025: This story has been edited to remove a misattributed quote.

Agencies are quietly quitting fossil-fuel contracts

We spoke with Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, about the current state of sustainability in marketing.

Nikki Maizel is president of Leo New York. She’s also served in lead roles at Publicis New York, McCann New York, and Grey Group.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? 

I help brands solve business problems with the power of creativity and technology. And sometimes, I help them solve problems they didn’t even know they had! Think of it as a mix between a firefighter, orchestra director, and artist, all in service of driving a client’s business forward. And did I mention, I get to do it with some of the best humans on the planet that I’d happily be stuck on a stranded island with? Seriously, you should see our group texts.

Recently, our Subway win has been incredibly fulfilling. We beat some of the biggest names in the industry by demonstrating how the combination of human insight and ideas combined with our bench of data and technology capabilities can unlock exponential creativity for the brand. Watch this space!

” film by Fallon London remains a masterclass in unexpected emotional connection. Gets me every time. I’m equally excited by work that proves effectiveness and creativity can amplify each other—like the 

 work for Walmart, which seamlessly blended entertainment with commerce in a culturally and contextually relevant, shoppable content series.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: 

I love cars and would have been a race-car driver in another life. There’s something about the precision, strategy, and split-second decision-making that parallels what we do in new business—everything has to work perfectly together to win, and we move at lightning speed.

I’m most optimistic about the staying power of human ingenuity when amplified by the right technology. We’re proving that AI enhances rather than replaces human creativity. I’m pessimistic about agencies that talk about AI integration without actually demonstrating it in their work and results (hence, using it as a catchphrase only).

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? 

 is my daily morning commute listen. It keeps me connected to broader business transformation discussions among the movers and shakers of industry. Marketing sits at the center of so many corporate challenges today—hearing these real-time interviews and discussions before I walk in the office always gives me something provocative to think about before I’ve even had my first sip of coffee (and those who know me well know it’s a trenta Starbucks iced, daily!).

Cutout of a woman, Nikki Maizel, president of Leo New York, centered on a templated blue background

Coworking with Nikki Maizel

She’s president, Leo New York. 

Ben Geheb is global chief experience officer at VML, where he has been for nearly 10 years. He was previously at the business consultancy Innosight, and he started his career as an electrical engineer.

For years I have worked closely with Ford, from helping design their 2030 corporate strategy to reimagining their entire digital and experience ecosystem. Part of that was being at the forefront of their electrification strategy. As such, I had the amazing opportunity to help reimagine the electrified experience ahead of the Mustang Mach-E launch. We were so early in the process, the vehicle was still being debated, yet we knew the experience had to push the norms of vehicle ownership and reinvent how Ford engages their owners. This project not only led to an expansion in charging, new services, launching BlueCruise, and many others, but it also changed how Ford works in a more human-centered way. It’s amazing to feel that at some small level I had an opportunity to put my fingerprint on the future strategy for such an iconic organization as Ford.

For me and my role in customer experience, I often think of this through that lens, and as a frequent traveler, it’s my experience with Delta. Currently the full integration of their loyalty program into their app that now seamlessly integrates to the seatback screens, all while managing my trip, is one of the best examples of a truly connected experience that simplifies and removes the stress of travel.

I am a tinkerer. Call it my old engineering background, but I’m always trying new things and new tech, or trying to fix old tech.

 AI and AI. It’s both epic and amazingly terrifying. I am optimistic at the transformative power it has in the work we do and how we do it. It should make experiences way more dynamic and reactive. It should bring seamlessness and personalization to a new scale. Yet the impact on jobs, the centralization of intelligence, and the path to get there is foggy, concerning, and at times terrifying, as the use cases in the wrong hands can bring that magic to places that challenge privacy, security, and discriminating bias.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you'd recommend? 

. I think it provides a rich daily perspective on market shifts and trends that impact our work every day. Beyond that, 

 provides a unique view into the lives of founders and organizations in ways I couldn’t imagine.

Cutout of a man, Ben Geheb, global chief experience officer at VML, displayed on a templated background.

Coworking with Ben Geheb

He’s global chief experience officer, VML.

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

The design landscape is changing rapidly. In some ways, it’s more accessible than ever as AI tools flood the market and AI companies pitch consumers and businesses alike on its ease of use. In others, it’s becoming more difficult to balance the need for personalization, the myriad touchpoints, finding ways to stand out amid the onslaught of AI slop, and more.

To understand how brands are managing this shift, Marketing Brew caught up with Kiser Barnes, chief creative officer and partner at Red Antler, who is set to speak about that topic at our upcoming 

You joined Red Antler last year as partner and chief creative officer. Tell us about what you’re doing. 

What I’ve been doing over the past year is really helping to evolve Red Antler into the new era of what brand building means. Brand building now is much more multidisciplinary in terms of the touchpoints that it needs to impact, the touchpoints that it needs to affect.

There are two things that are happening. One is [that] tech and marketing are merging. Tech brands are becoming marketing brands. Marketing brands and agencies are becoming—are being forced to become—tech brands. And the tools are accelerating the speed at which we need to get to market. They’re also accelerating the ability to personalize and customize brands in ways that it’s never been before…The second part of that is about social and the idea that people are interacting with brands in very fragmented ways and multi-touchpoint ways around social. The first way you might interact with a new brand might be through a social post versus the traditional way of the past, which was typically through advertising or through a website or through some sort of marketing material…In order to be a brand expert and a brand builder, now you have to be able to think about how you orchestrate across all of these different touchpoints. You, of course, have to think about the tools and the ways that those tools become increasingly relevant to the work that you do, and you have to evolve constantly.

How does the cultural desire for personalization change the design conversation? 

It’s so exciting from a design standpoint. It means that we have to build increasingly modular brands. A lot of the ways that we think about brands are shifting from this idea of the brand bible that sits on a shelf somewhere and collects dust into this mode of a living, breathing thing that should always be evolving and always shifting…It means that we have to build a wider toolkit for brands. We’ve got to build enough of a toolkit that can be taken right by social influencers, or it can be taken by vendors, or it can be plugged into experiential in the real world. And so we have to really think wide now. I don’t think that brand teams ever did that in the past…To build a brand now, you can’t just think about the logo and the font and the color and that stuff. You’ve got to not just test it out but really think about how it shows up in the real world as experiential or retail, how it shows up on social platforms. And you have to really know those spaces…It just means that we have to build brands from a design standpoint, brands that are much richer, much more modular, much more connected to full-ecosystem thinking.

That’s all happening at a time when people have much stronger reactions to brand changes today, like we just saw with 

Brands are much more fluid, and they’re really responsive to culture now. This old idea of a pristine brand sitting in an ivory tower is not as relevant anymore. And again, it’s this influence. It’s the impact and amplification of social and influencer[s]. If you think about it, we’re in a culture of influencer. I don’t think that’s set in, but our president is an influencer, our entire cabinet is made of influencers. Not to be provocative, but we are in a culture now of influence, where influence is king. That means that brands have to be more democratic. They’ve got to really think about what their people and their fans and their loyalists really think about and care about in the brand.

Ultimately—hopefully—that’s a good thing for brands. It means it’s more influenced by [the] community, it’s more influenced in the sense of co-ownership. But I do think that’s a huge pivot.

Another major shift that we’ve touched on is the introduction of all of these AI tools to the market. That’s changing the design landscape. I’m curious, if everyone is using the same tools and those tools are trained on what has been, how can design continue to push the envelope? 

The tools are really great for, in my mind, workflow, amplification of ideas, creativity. I have a thesis that the human soul is about experimentation. What makes us really creative, and what makes us feel, what creates differentiation is experimentation. It’s like when jazz came into the scene and it created a new language of music. Every single cultural shift and change has been driven by this incredible explosion of creative experimentation. And that is what makes us uniquely human…The machine and AI can’t do that, certainly not now. I’m sure it’ll be programmed to do a little bit more of it. But that’s what makes us unique, and I do think we’re already starting to see a response to AI and to this mass adoption of AI.

You’ll see it in fashion and luxury brands are going back to stop-motion and handcrafted techniques for creating content, which is really beautiful. I do think there’s always a pendulum swing…Brands go back and forth. But I do think, ultimately, the tools allow us to do things more rapidly. They allow us to touch more spaces, and they allow us to have more depth in terms of strategy research, the foundational pieces of brand building. So from a design perspective, they allow us to take an idea and really amplify it…I do think we will always have to, as creative leaders, show up in ways that feel differentiated and cut through that sort of clutter of noise. There’s this idea of AI slop, that everything will be kind of created by AI, and it’s bots speaking to bots—the dead internet theory. There’s so many kinds of theories around this and that. Ultimately, we’ll have to find ways to differentiate, and once those tools become widely adopted, we will come up with more interesting ways to approach creativity and to approach marketing. I believe that strongly. That’s what the human spirit’s all about.