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The spirit of a good ad still comes from humans. 

That gem was dropped during a fireside chat at the Marketing Brew Summit, where Ali Haeri, mntn’s SVP of marketing, sat down with Morning Brew Inc.’s Kristine Wyatt to unpack the ever-evolving world of advertising in today’s content-saturated landscape.

If you missed the live convo, don’t sweat it. We’re here to break down the highlights you might’ve missed.

Grab your coffee and your content calendar. Let’s chat about creative marketing.

Haeri started the conversation by laying out a simple truth: Today’s marketers are stuck between too much content and not enough eyeballs (short attention spans, we’re lookin’ at you).

That’s because marketing was way simpler back in the day, when everyone watched the same TV shows and listened to the same top pop hits. Ads were way less targeted because, well, they didn’t really need to be.

Now, with tons of content options and all the tech powering modern advertising, marketers face a new problem: Targeting is easier than ever, but breaking through the noise is harder than ever.

“When it’s done well, it really cuts through the noise because again, people are sort of consuming so much content,” Haeri said about this modern-day marketing phenomenon. “A lot of it’s ad-supported. And the stuff that’s memorable is the stuff that is really timely.”

For marketers today, that means you get only one chance (two if you’re lucky) to grab your audience’s attention. Waste that, and you might not get another opportunity to get your brand to make a lasting impression.

In case you needed a reminder, mntn actually has a pretty big name in their leadership team, boasting Ryan Reynolds as their chief creative officer. Haeri highlighted the work Reynolds does with his agency, Maximum Effort, as an example of how important speed is for marketing.

“But for me, really, the reaction time to knowing that you need new creative is really important,” Haeri emphasized.

He laid out Maximum Effort’s rapid creative process, including how many of the ideas are iterated over text messages.

“The scripts are simple,” Haeri said. “They’re not formatted in some sort of way that you’d see, like a movie script. It’s just written in a Word document. They’ll come up with an idea and then, like a day or two later, it’s shooting. And a day or two after that, it’s live on air.”

To prove his point, Haeri cited a recent campaign Maximum Effort created. When an infamous CEO at a certain concert was featured on the jumbotron, the agency jumped on the viral moment immediately, creating a campaign and dropping it in just a few days.

That’s because the most impactful ads aren’t necessarily the most expensive. Instead, they’re the ones that feel like they’re part of a big moment. Cultural relevance > perfection. And being able to move quickly goes a long way toward helping you stay relevant.

Don’t worry, Haeri knows AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s a great tool for marketers, but it can’t come up with great ideas—at least, not like humans can.

Haeri referenced one of mntn’s most successful campaigns to prove his point: an ad featuring Steve-O from 

 eating the world’s spiciest chili pepper and then doing a demo of their platform. Not really the type of campaign an AI platform could have come up with…

The key is to encourage your team to experiment with AI, especially for time-saving tasks like organizing documents, summarizing content, or taking meeting notes. Basically, AI is best used to “take away all of the BS that I don’t really need to be consuming my time with thinking about,” Haeri said.

Remember, AI is here for support, not to replace you or your team. With that in mind, AI can help free up your time so you can focus on more impactful work.

Never want to go to Utah? Yep, Haeri’s seen those ads too, and he’s right there with you. It does teach us a valuable lesson, though: Ad fatigue is a very real thing, and everyone gets tired of seeing the same ad for the thousandth time.

“I remember watching my UCLA Bruins in March Madness a couple of years ago, and every single ad pod, every ad break was ‘visit Utah,’ like, three times in a row,” Haeri recalled. “It made me never want to visit Utah again. And then my brother moved to Utah. Now it’s complicated things for me.”

Yep, bombarding your audience with the same ad one too many times will hurt you, but so will showing a certain ad to the 

Haeri recalled a time when he was served a mntn ad and had this epiphany: “I thought to myself, like, this is obviously great, but if someone already had some exposure to MNTN, how impactful would this ad be? That’s again, sort of introducing MNTN. And this is like advertising 101, like aligning your ads with the marketing funnel.”

His solution? Create a new ad for retargeting so that particular audience segment would see a straightforward demo showcasing their platform’s benefits. The results speak for themselves.

“When we only showed this ad as a retargeting ad to people who had already visited the MNTN website, it outperformed any other retargeting ad that we ever had before,” Haeri said. “Because again, it sort of freed us of having to explain what MNTN is to someone who has never heard of it before, and it allowed us to just focus on benefits.”

Wyatt ended the fireside chat by asking Haeri one big question: “If you had $50,000 in a very small team, what would you do in 30 days?”

Haeri’s response? He plugged Quick Frame, a company that mntn acquired a couple of years ago. He described Quick Frame as “a secret weapon for marketers because it’s a platform made up of video professionals like motion graphics artists, editors, full-blown-TV-shoot commercial directors.”

Quick Frame helps marketers create TV-quality creative fast 

affordably, and then it deploys that top-notch creative across your channels ASAP. In just 30 days, you would get results.

At the end of the day, even with AI, ad tech, and celebrity-backed creative, the best ads still need that human touch. Tools can help you move faster and focus on the more important things, but real connection, creativity, and craft? That’s all you.

Ali Haeri and Kristine Wyatt speak on stage at the Marketing Brew Summit 2025 during a session titled "Creativity + Tech: The Future of Impact Marketing at Scale," with vibrant lighting and event branding in the background.

mntn_sep25_eventsrecap_article

How mntn scales creative marketing at speed with insights on AI, ad fatigue, and timely campaigns

Recapping the Marketing Brew Summit 2025 fireside chat with mntn

The spirit of a good ad

Jasmine Sheena

Times are a-changin’. Eighty percent of marketers surveyed think marketing will look completely different 18 months from now, and nearly 90% said that agility is the most important trait for a marketer to have these days, according to a survey conducted by Morning Brew and shared at our annual Marketing Brew Summit in New York.

Marketers from Sephora, Duolingo, and more showed up onstage at the summit to talk about how they’re working to stay agile amid the shifts. Below are some key takeaways from panelists on how they’ve adapted their marketing strategies ahead of 2026.

 Campaigns that take into account the specific audience they’re catering to and/or social trends of the time can boost impact. Take Duolingo, which, while known for its often-viral 

, is rolling out an anime series in October after seeing manga lovers drive a spike in the number of users learning Japanese on its platform, Manu Orssaud, Duolingo CMO, said onstage.

“It’s the same thing with Korean. People learn Korean because they’re really into…K-pop,” he said. “It’s connecting language to that cultural affinity they have. Anime is a huge fandom, and it’s also one that really connects to our core offering, which is language learning.”

Relatedly, Audible altered its marketing playbook for the Japanese market after an initial batch of global creative did not perform as well in the market as it did in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, Cynthia Chu, Audible’s chief financial and growth officer, said onstage. “We actually had to create the word ‘audiobook,’” she said.

While the team was focused on driving brand awareness, “we had to create category awareness” too, Chu said. With that said, she added, “The consistency is the core of the messaging…That didn’t change, but the execution of that did change marketplace by marketplace.”

 Sometimes, new audiences inspire brands to think outside the box. When video game developer Gamefam worked on a 

, on Roblox, the team took into account the fact that Roblox is largely populated with Gen Alpha users who may not know Cher as well as older generations might, Ricardo Briceno, Gamefam’s chief business officer, said onstage. To drive awareness of Cher and her music among a potentially new set of listeners, Gamefam created a Roblox quest to collect and deliver holiday presents that were set to songs from 

. The activation coincided with an uptick in Spotify streams of the album, he said.

Sephora similarly supplemented its marketing as part of a push into 

. In January, it became the official beauty sponsor of women’s 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled, and created, among other things, a “glam room” at the league’s facility in Miami, Florida. In April, Sephora was announced as a founding partner of WNBA expansion team the Golden State Valkyries. As part of that partnership, Sephora has placed a kiosk at Chase Center in San Francisco, California, where the Valkyries play, where fans can try and buy beauty products, Emmy Brown Berlind, SVP and general manager of loyalty at Sephora, said.

The Unrivaled partnership is “an example of how we’ve been able to connect the self-expression that already exists within those spaces with what we offer as a brand,” she said. At Valkyries games, “people take selfies in front of [the kiosk]. They’re buying their lip glosses while they’re at the game.”

 In an era of continual generative AI creep, marketers may benefit from focusing on their tech capabilities. Duolingo created its own social scraper tool that scrapes comments from social platforms to help the brand identify themes within relevant fandoms to help inform its strategy, Orssaud said. Unilever similarly uses social scraper tools, developed by an agency it works with and customized for different Unilever brands, for social listening, Kathleen Dunlop, CMO, beauty and wellbeing, North America, at Unilever, said onstage. That listening can help inform big-swing campaigns: for its award-winning “Vaseline Verified” campaign, Unilever used social listening to identify the many ways that consumers use Vaseline, including beauty hacks along with household uses, like softening a baseball glove.

Many brands are also embracing AI to help create video to meet an increasing demand for content, Aston Ford, manager of video operations at Mntn, said onstage, but he noted that a human touch is still key.

“The marketers that want to continue to have an edge will need to depend on human creativity in order to stand out from the rest,” he said.

Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud and Marketing Brew senior reporter Katie Hicks.

How marketers are meeting the moment in 2025

Marketers from Sephora, Duolingo, and more appeared onstage at the annual Marketing Brew Summit to talk agility and change.

Plenty of marketers are looking to master AI in a rapidly changing tech landscape. So we hosted an event focused on it.

At “Tactical MarTech: The Future of AI, Attribution, and Privacy” held in New York this week, Marketing Brew sat down with execs and chatted brand strategy, AI, privacy, and more. Leaders from brands like Reddit, Anomaly, Mount Sinai Health System, and L’Oreal joined us onstage to share their insights. Below, we compiled some of their tips.

“Someone taught me you can go to your refrigerator, take a picture, and then put in ChatGPT or whatever your gen-AI tool preference is, and say, ‘create five recipes from this image.’I was like, ‘this is going to say marriages…’ And sure enough, it took that bad spinach that's always there and never gets used and found other things to actually make a meal out of and break down the prep…Find different ways to immerse yourself in it on a personal level to get more comfortable with it at work.” —Alicia Criner, global marketing leader formerly at Galderma

Tip #2: Consider the unexpected ways consumers are using AI.

“There was this big spike in conversation, not in tech-related communities, but in home care and plant-related communities…It was conversation around what are the best apps using computer vision to take photos of plants to understand the diagnosis or what's wrong and how to care for their plants.

Oftentimes when we think about where these conversations are happening, they’re really wide and diverse and coming from unexpected places. I’m trying to bring that into marketing conversations and creative conversations. Maybe we’re thinking about this too narrowly.” —Matt Klein, head of global foresight, Reddit

Tip #3: Refine your approach to attribution.

“As an industry, we’ve started to use attribution as an umbrella term to mean a lot of different things. We need to be very refined in how we're having these conversations and what exactly [is] the business outcome that you are trying to get to. What is the goal of your measurement model that you’re using? Is it attribution? Is it media measurement? Is it the role that media measurement plays in getting you to that business outcome?”—Caroline Proto, director, global media, EssilorLuxottica

Tip #4: Consider privacy regulations at a state level.

“Facebook also deprecated a lot of the content moderation…We have 50 different breach laws, right? We don’t have unified breach laws. I think people are focusing on the wrong thing. [In] 20 states you’ve got enforcement.” —Richy Glassberg, CEO, SafeGuard Privacy

Marketing executive Alicia Criner speaking onstage at a Marketing Brew event

TrustPilot

Trustpilot Feb 2025 Branded Article

Insights from Tactical MarTech: The Future of AI, Attribution, and Privacy 

Execs from Reddit, EssilorLuxottica, and more talked leveraging new tech, refining attribution, and navigating state privacy laws. 

AI, AI, AI: It’s the hot new buzzword on every marketer’s mind, but does anybody actually know what they’re talking about? (We’re assuming, dear reader, that you’re not Sam Altman.)

While Altman didn’t appear at Marketing Brew’s event, The Marketer’s (Early) Guide to AI, we did speak onstage with a number of agency and brand executives to hear how they are incorporating generative AI in their marketing.

Read some excerpts from the onstage conversations below.

Nigel Storey, CTO of Zappos, on which AI tools to have in your arsenal:

My guess is everyone here is probably already using ChatGPT, but ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity are the primary three that everyone should be testing, playing with, seeing how they work. I think Perplexity is pretty clever and cool in the sense that it cites the sources.

Michael Cohen, global chief data and analytics officer, Plus Company,

on crafting safety guardrails around generative AI:

We have an AI community practice. Within the community practice is a policy group set up by myself and our general counsel. That’s the team that needs to come together. When I think about the two things that we need to really keep a sharp eye on for agencies, it’s the data that’s going into the AI and the license agreements that the software has. The first thing that we lead with is, Do we feel protected with the license agreements for a particular software?

Daisy Jones, agency solutions manager, Meta, on navigating challenges with chatbots:

Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp all have unique restrictions and data privacy policies. Within WhatsApp, because it’s tied to a user’s phone number, as long as there is opt-in to messaging or texting, there is the possibility to use that audience that a client might have already gathered through SMS types of opt-ins and things like that. For Instagram and Facebook, that opt-in has to happen directly in the platform.

Jennifer Kattula, general manager of global marketing, Microsoft Advertising, on training AI:

We actually did an experiment in between when we were prepping where we trained the AI with context: Here’s our brand personality for Microsoft Advertising; here are the attributes of that personality; here are the descriptions of those attributes: Microsoft’s brand personality as a trailblazer is kind, daring, and deep. Then we took that as the context and said, rewrite this blog with that information. Rewrite these social posts with that information.

What we found was that the [Microsoft] Copilot was helpful in some cases, [and] sometimes too literal. We didn’t do any reprompting. I think that’s where the patience comes in: To help the Copilot learn some of the nuance in terms of being too literal. Sometimes it would say, you can be daring, when you really want the essence of daring…What we’re going to try next is starting with some more raw content. Not a fully formed blog that was already written by somebody that really understands our brand, but maybe a set of bullet points. Then have that get to 80% with Copilot and then have a human refine it to the last 20%.

Devika Bulchandani, global CEO, Ogilvy, on using AI without fearing it:

Every single time we’ve prognosticated that something’s going to come and kill us, including Covid, it didn’t. We prevailed...By the way, we create most of these things. It’s not like somebody else from Mars came and created it.

Morning Brew executive editor Josh Sternberg and Ogilvy Global CEO Devika Bulchandani onstage at the Marketer's (Early) Guide to AI 

Brew Events

The spirit of a good ad

How marketers are meeting the moment in 2025

Insights from Tactical MarTech: The Future of AI, Attribution, and Privacy

From tools to use to chatbot challenges, marketers share how they’re navigating AI

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