Marie Gulin-Merle (Google) & Anda Gansca (Knotch) | The New Era of AI-Powered Marketing

0:00Jim Stengel:Before we dive into today's episode, we would very much appreciate a moment from you to make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, along with optioning to auto-download the episodes. It really is the best way to never miss an episode, along with supporting the show and the amazing team that helps me bring it to you. And while you're there, leave us a rating or review. It only takes a minute and helps more people find the show and helps us learn. And of course, share this episode with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it. We wouldn't be here six years later and still going so strong without you all, our community.

0:36Jim Stengel:So thank you for being part of it. Now onto the show. If you were a chief marketing officer in consumer products, I want you to think about something for a moment. You have creative that works. You have campaigns that capture attention. But somewhere between that moment and the register, the signal gets lost. You cannot see what actually drove the sale. You are making optimization decisions on inference, not truth. Well, that changed in February. Infillion acquired Catalina, four decades of deterministic purchase intelligence, 130 million U.S. households, 70 retail banners,$600 billion in verified annual consumer spending.

1:13Jim Stengel:And here is what really matters. Over 90 % of consumable purchases still happen in-store. Infillion and Catalina together can close the loop from digital advertising to in-lane purchase and incentivize the next one. This is not a measurement tool you consult after the campaign. This is a live signal that runs through your media while the campaign is in flight. You can now optimize from attention to action in real time against people whose actual purchase behavior you know. A consumer products brand needs return on ad spending. It needs foot traffic. Infilion now delivers all of it. Not as separate vendors you reconcile later as one connected platform.

1:52Jim Stengel:That is what closing the gap looks like. I spent years at Procter & Gamble trying to answer that question. We had the creative. We had the reach. We had campaigns that genuinely stopped people. And then we watched that value quietly disappear somewhere between the moment of engagement and the proof of a business result. That gap between attention and action is where most media budgets go to die. And most digital media platforms have been content to live inside it just a little upstream from accountability. Infillion is the company that decided to close it. They started as the original attention company built on the idea that a consumer choosing to engage with an ad is worth more than one who ignores it.

2:30Jim Stengel:But they did not stop there. They have built the infrastructure to connect the moment of attention to the proof of action across every screen, every format, every vertical. That is not a feature. That is a fundamentally different idea of what an ad platform should be. And it is the one brands have been waiting for. Learn more in the show notes. First of all, no one has it figured out. LinkedIn is a bit of a lie. If people say that they have it figured out, it's just not true. We're all still trying to figure out how to make AI have taste, judgment, expertise. TBD if we can. It's just the truth.

3:04It's a bit of a mess. I think being comfortable with the fact that it's messy is really important. And the final thing is just don't forget about the human.

3:13Jim Stengel:Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose. because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling, and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges, along with how they try to build a full, healthy, and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders So here we go.

3:50Jim Stengel:As we continue our episodes captured during this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, today's episode brings together two leaders helping shape the biggest transformation in modern marketing, the shift from static digital media experiences to intelligent AI-powered customer engagement. This will be a conversation about AI, but also a conversation about partnership and trust. My first guest is Marie Gulen-Meyerl, Global Vice President of Ads and Commerce Marketing at Google, where she leads global strategy for one of the world's most influential marketing platforms. And prior to Google, Marie held senior marketing leadership roles at L 'Oreal and Calvin Klein.

4:29Jim Stengel:Joining her is Anda Ganska, co-founder and CEO of Notch. Over the past decade, Anda has built Notch into a leading intelligence platform that helps brands understand how their content performs, how customers engage, and how AI can create more personalized digital experiences. She also serves on the board of EFI Worldwide and has become one of the industry's leading voices on the future of marketing and customer experience. The timing of this conversation couldn't be better. Just before we sat down, Notch announced the launch of ACE, the agentic content engine, developed in partnership with Google Cloud, Vertix AI, and Gemini.

5:08Jim Stengel:But this conversation goes well beyond talking about a product announcement. Whether you're excited by AI, overwhelmed by it, or simply trying to make sense of where marketing goes next, I think you'll find this conversation both practical and refreshingly honest. This episode was captured live from the Infillion Cafe during CanLions 2026. Here's Anda and Marie. Well, welcome, Handa and Marie. A very warm podcast recording at the Affiliate Cafe in Cannes on the Monday of Cannes. So, at the beginning of the week, what are you most looking forward to this week here in Cannes? What's the highlight of the week for you?

5:45Jim Stengel:Is there a meeting, a person, a presentation? The best part of Cannes is the serendipity of Cannes. You know, a lot of great new ideas start in Cannes. So, I'm looking forward to that. I agree. and so send your pity and the kind of the the vibes and the moments and the person you're going to run into and you could have scheduled you could have tried to schedule wouldn't have seen the person and the state of the union because it's the only time in the year maybe there are very few times in the year where everybody gathers and so you can feel the kind of the state of the industry. I had a panel earlier this morning with three CMOs in the Palais, and I asked them how they see their job right now.

6:31Jim Stengel:And they all said, we need to be positive, optimistic, and confident because our people are looking to us. And these are very wild times we're in. So this idea of optimism, positivity came out loud and strong. Great. But at the same time, being pragmatic, right? Now, you had an exciting announcement last week, and we're going to get to that in a minute, but I wanted our audience to get to know each of you a bit before we jump into the announcement. And Marie, first to you, your career has been beauty, fashion, and now tech for the past seven years at Google. You've been at Google about as long as you were at L 'Oreal.

7:04Jim Stengel:So how have you evolved as a leader over those seven years at the most famous tech company in the world, I would say? So I was at L 'Oreal 18 years. So technically - Oh, but seven years as CMO. Almost, yeah. Well, everything has changed and nothing has changed. I think the job has not changed in the sense that it's about connecting great brands. And I'm fortunate, very privileged that I've worked for, you know, iconic brands. So connecting brands and products with people, people, actual people. So that's the same job and passion. But the way you do it and the world around it has changed. You know, in the U.S., not in France, it doesn't translate in France.

7:50But in the U.S., I say it's my third rodeo because I started at L 'Oréal. I was a webmaster.

7:57Jim Stengel:Oh, wow. So I had to explain differences between broadband and analog websites. But I was just building websites. And then when I was CMO at L 'Oréal was the mobile, social, those years, programmatic years. And now it's AI. And, you know, this rodeo or this wave is a bit different. It's faster, a bit more profound. It's multipurpose. It goes way beyond, you know, consumer and marketing. And so, yeah, so everything has changed. Nothing has changed. If I were to magically drop you back to L 'Oreal right now as CEO, let's say, how would you approach the job? I say hi to the current CEO. He was my boss.

8:46Okay. All right. Well, super. This is magic.

8:48Jim Stengel:This is fantasy. But if I would drop you back, how would you approach the job differently based on the seven years you've had at Google? Well, I would partner with Google differently, maybe. Say more about that. Maybe I would go deeper in some conversations. I would also look at data differently. I think, you know, working with now, maybe a third of my team is data scientists, marketing engineers, which is different from the CPG world we all come from. But so I would, my data instincts, I think, have been trained differently. So I would probably look at data and content a bit differently. And I think, you know, I think they do a great job.

9:30And I say hi to Asmita, who's the CMO in seat now and who's a good friend. And, you know, they do a brilliant job.

9:38Jim Stengel:Yeah, super. So, Anda, your story is very different, right? You hail from Romania, not France. And rather than joining established companies, you spent your career building a company. You went to Stanford, launch is 13 years old? Launch is 10 years old. 10 years old. Okay, 10 years old. You've raised more than$40 million, and you've been at the center of how this whole marketing ecosystem is changing. So could you talk a bit about, go back 10 years, when you founded the company, what were you trying to do? What problem were you trying to solve? Fast forward 10 years, has that problem changed? We started Notch actually here in Cannes to some extent.

10:16That was my first Cannes ever, 2016. My co-founder and I were here, and our dream, actually, is what I think we've made real, which is to make the internet a more personalized, relevant experience. Back then, we couldn't understand why there was so much great content and so many great digital experiences, and yet the experience of the internet for a consumer still felt really static and generic. And so back then, we did what we knew how to do. He's a design nerd, I'm a data nerd, and together we built a digital intelligence and optimization platform that now is used by most of the Fortune 500.

10:50And over the last eight years, we've measured some of the biggest websites and digital properties in the US. And I've started to see how customer journeys are unfolding, the type of content that makes people tick, makes people want to do business with the brand versus the content that turns them off and makes them leave and never come back. And it's that knowledge and expertise and data set that inspired us to ultimately build a more automated system that can finally deliver on a promise that I think marketers have heard for the past 10 years, which is personalization, hyper-personalization, because I think the technology actually is finally available to make that a reality with the right data and expertise.

11:32Jim Stengel:What are the characteristics of content that people want to engage with versus stuff that angers them, turns them off, frustrates them? Well, I'll answer it from the lens of today, because Marie made a point that, you know, marketing is about humans, about people, right? It's about connecting people with products that they're going to get value from. I think in today's world, there's a lot of marketers who have fallen in this, I would call it a trap of thinking they can game LLMs by creating a ton of agent-first content. And this idea of marketing to agents has been very catchy. And I think for good reason to some extent.

12:11But what we've seen is that it's exactly that type of content that turns off a human audience. And interestingly, the type of content that humans want, which is immersive, experiential, multimodal, right? Something that's visual and audio and video and so on. That's exactly the type of content that agents cannot consume. So it's an interesting paradox and an interesting moment in time where I think marketers have to think about basically how to do both but not sacrifice either.

12:39Jim Stengel:Tell me how you two met. Marie, about the time of the company's founding. We were at a CMO thing with lots of CMOs you know, and the theme was failure. Yes. It was a salon thing. And we bonded over saying the actual things that are happening in the industry and not the performative side of the industry. we bonded over you know facts and data truth and I complimented your hair right and you want you know yes and she wanted you know hair color yes she introduced me to her hair and I and and I was already interested in content that moves people that also works and sells and so yeah always the beginning yeah there's something about, I think, some people in this industry who connect and we sort of tell each other like what's really going on.

13:38And Marie has this incredibly interesting perspective because of obviously the results she's driven for so many different types of companies in different industries. I get to work with so many different CMOs and brands. And so we're constantly coming together, kind of saying like, is this like a real thing? What do you think? Is this a real thing? And we sort of go back and forth. And it's nice to have that because there's a lot of performative stuff in our industry and here in particular.

14:11Jim Stengel:One of the things I have learned from years of talking to the best CMOs in the world is this. The question is never just whether your creative is working. The question is whether your infrastructure can keep up with it. Because a brilliant campaign still has to travel through an ad stack, through data, through decisioning, through supply, through measurement. And every hop in that journey is a place where value leaks out. Most platforms solve one piece of that, a data company, a DSP, a measurement vendor. You stitch them together and pay a fragmentation tax in performance, in speed, and in accountability.

14:43Jim Stengel:Infillion built something very different. Demand, supply, data, measurement, and creative connected in a single composable platform. The highest performing opt-in attention formats via Infillion's proprietary tech in the industry, agnostic identity resolution solutions, and now Catalina, 130 million U.S. households of verified purchase truth running as live signal through every campaign they execute. No black boxes, no hops, no fragmented vendor relationships to manage. The only company I know of that can take you from the first moment of attention to the final proof of action for any vertical on any screen without leaving the platform.

15:21Jim Stengel:Open, composable, agentic. That is Infilion.

15:29Jim Stengel:I got a question this morning in a panel. Is authenticity now performative? That's so funny. That's a heavy question. Okay. So in French would be faux authenticity. So it's a bit fatigued, the word authenticity, but you know, candor, radical candor, actual shit going on. Like that's how we bonded. And then a year ago, same place, we were talking about data strength. At that time and still to this day, it's still very important to get good AI outcomes. You need good data. You know, it's this garbage in, garbage out idea. So the AI output is only as good as the data input. And so we bonded over, well, wait, there is data strength, but there is also content strength and not content to machines necessarily, content to people.

16:24Sometimes I say this machine thing is not new. Like programmatic is a machine, like feeds machines. The first SEO, I remember my first job at L 'Oréal, I was a webmaster. And so some agencies were asking me to do aliases. You remember the aliases pages? It's a bit like the AI pages today. So this is not new. So we bonded over content strength. And then, you know, we started to partner on websites and what a good websites mean today.

16:58Jim Stengel:What do you admire about each other? Oh, gosh, so much about Marie. She is one of the biggest thinkers that I've met in this industry. You know, wherever she goes, she's managed to, because I've seen her at L 'Oreal, Kevin Klein, and now at Google. Her teams are always just incredible. And I think your team says so much about you. You know, the way they operate, the respect they have for each other, how fast they can move. And I've seen this firsthand at Google in the last year. I mean, we had a brainstorm on the future of content personalization websites at the Google dinner in Cannes last year.

17:33And she said to me, let's figure this out. And I thought to myself, OK, Marie, like it's Google. It's big. It's slow. You know, it's going to take time. Sorry, it's the truth. And within, I don't know, four to six weeks, we were off to the races. Four months ago, we launched the first live experience. So it's really incredible to see a team that operates at that scale, able to execute that quickly and do it also in just the best kind of attitude and having fun. And I think that says the world about her. And then I admire her as a mom. I admire her as I love her partner who I've gotten to meet.

18:16So yeah, everything really. She's a bit of an icon. Pretty nice, Marie. Okay.

18:20Jim Stengel:Yeah, your turn. Who doesn't love is, you know, strong, authentic, vulnerable, smart woman. I like that you're a force. You're a force. I remember during COVID, the early days of COVID and, you know, most startups were trying to figure it out and you know in two days you had a plan and so i remember this i remember so many conversations you know we partner with lots of people in my type of job i as you know it's not a partnership it's like and i don't want to i don't want to you know fatigue the word friendship i think it's we're equals i'm not the clients and you're not the partner where it's a it's an exchange.

19:07There is listening, both sides. She meets best in class. And you don't only want to just work with me, you work with my team too, which is also a good lesson. I think to treat the head of the team and the team the same way. And the team respects you and your team for this too. That's very kind. Thank you.

19:31Jim Stengel:So an emerging theme this week. I was with Fabi Torres at Gap before this, interviewing her down by the sea. And we talked about talent and creators and designers, and they see them as equals. We're together. This is not a client. This is not a partner. It's just we're all in this together. We have a common vision. We respect each other's creativity and point of view, and we're all in it together. I think that's the only way to do great work. I think that's the only way to extract real value from your partners, because if you treat them like vendors in a transactional way, they're going to respond back in the same way.

20:11But the reality is, whether it's us or your agency or whoever, we get to see what's happening in so many companies. And there's something quite important and insightful about that, especially if we can have sort of private conversations about what we really see happening. So yeah, I agree with that.

20:26Jim Stengel:Well, I said up front here, you had a big announcement that we're going to talk about. I'd like to do that right now. Just last week, so this is kind of breaking news, right? Notch announced ACE, the agentic content engine, a new AI experience, infrastructure platform built on Google Cloud, Vertex AI, and Gemini. That's a lot of modern marketing buzzwords all in one. So what does it mean? Yeah. What is this new capability? Why are you excited about it? Yeah. How did it start? And the acronym is ACE, right? ACE, yeah. Yeah. So we started this brainstorm. What's the future of content? What's the future of personalization?

21:01What's the future of websites? So what was powering our assumptions in this brainstorm was all of the data and the insights that we were seeing across our data set. And we saw the emergence of what we call the AI native consumer. The AI native consumer is someone who uses LLMs, search, social, websites, everything to really go from I know nothing about this to I've made a decision. And the example I've kept using is I was looking as it's a real example. I was looking for an electric car that doesn't look like a mom van and I know nothing about cars, right? So I was doing part of my research with Gemini, part of my research with search, and then I would arrive at a car manufacturer's website.

21:43The problem is I go from a highly personalized conversation to now I'm in a website that's static, generic and highly unintelligent. And so I actually went to the website of a car manufacturer. They didn't even have an electric car section. And so I left and I bought a different car. The problem is websites often reflect the organizational chart of a company more so than they reflect the consumer need. And so the question that we were trying to answer is how can we take the content, atomize it, which is essentially break it down into Lego blocks, take the data that we have about what we know about the CN native consumer when they arrive at a website, and power an experience that would allow the consumer to change the website and make it what they need, as opposed to have the website be what the marketing team thinks it should be.