Over the past few years, it’s become cliché to say “marketing is changing fast.” But in my recent conversation with Brianna Gays, CMO at Smartly, it became clear that we’re not just in a period of change; we’re in the middle of a structural reset for how brands reach and engage audiences.
According to Brianna, two forces are driving this shift: the convergence of entertainment and the rise of AI.
Entertainment Isn’t a Channel Anymore; It’s an Ecosystem
Once upon a time, “TV” was TV. Today, audiences jump seamlessly between Netflix, YouTube, Roku, Reddit, Roblox, and dozens of other environments, and they don’t particularly care which one we, as marketers, label “social,” “CTV,” or “UGC.”
Brianna’s point was simple: if we still plan campaigns like it’s 2012 (TV here, social there, search over there), we’re missing how people actually experience content now.
This convergence has a big implication for content strategy. Marketers are rebalancing away from pure lower-funnel performance spend and reinvesting in owned, organic, and earned media that can surface across AI search, LLMs, and recommendation engines. In other words, what we used to think of as “brand content” is now functional infrastructure for discoverability in an AI-driven world.
Events as “Content Generation Nodes”
One of my favorite moments in our conversation was when Brianna described how events are no longer moments in time, but “content generation nodes.”
At Smartly, a flagship event like their Advance Summit isn’t judged solely by registrations or on-site pipeline. It’s engineered to produce evergreen assets: talk tracks, clips, social snippets, thought-leadership posts, that can fuel LinkedIn, paid media, and broader campaigns long after the event ends.
The catch: for this to work, the event still has to feel unmistakably human. AI can help with production and distribution, but it can’t replace the authenticity and connection that make the content resonate in the first place.
Creative Abundance, But Not Enough Variety
We also dug into one of the big paradoxes in modern marketing: we’re drowning in creative assets, yet starving for variety.
Brands have endless versions of core visuals, but they often lack the fresh, contextual, highly tailored variants needed to keep different audience segments engaged without burning them out.
Here, Brianna sees AI as a way to reduce “non-working” dollars: the slow, manual, production-heavy parts of creative operations, so teams can focus more on strategy and storytelling. AI becomes a force multiplier: same budget, more learning cycles, more relevant creative.
AI as Copilot, Not Creative Director
Another theme that stood out was the evolving role of marketing leaders. Many CMOs are used to “command and control,” personally approving every asset. Brianna argues that the job is shifting from approving each piece to training the system.
Instead of trying to be the bottleneck, leaders define brand guidelines, constraints, and examples, then work with AI tools as a copilot that can generate at scale while staying on brand.
This is especially powerful in channels like CTV, where new tools are turning what used to be a pure upper-funnel play into something much closer to performance marketing, with real-time frequency capping and tighter links between exposure and outcomes.
Avoiding “AI Slop”
Of course, there’s a dark side: what Brianna called the risk of “AI slop: “content that feels cheap, uncanny, or inauthentic.
Consumers are increasingly sensitive to synthetic humans and over-personalized experiences that cross the line into “creepy.” They’re far more accepting of AI behind the scenes (tweaking a background color, resizing a layout, generating variants) than of AI pretending to be a human face or voice.
For brands, the mandate is clear: use AI aggressively for efficiency and relevance, but be radically transparent and human in how you show up.
As Brianna put it, the future belongs to teams who are “AI first, every day” in their workflows, while staying relentlessly focused on authenticity in what the audience actually sees.
Discussion points include:
- How the convergence of entertainment across platforms is reshaping media planning.
- Why owned, earned, and organic content are becoming critical to AI-era discoverability.
- Ways to design events as ongoing content engines, not one-off moments.
- The tension between “creative abundance” and the need for genuine variety and personalization.
- How CMOs can evolve from command-and-control approvers to system-trainers in an AI-first stack.
- The emerging role of CTV as a performance channel with real-time optimization.
- Practical boundaries between useful AI-assisted creativity and off-putting “AI slop.