AI Won't Save Marketing - Marco Matos

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Marco Matos, co-founder and CEO of Adora, where he leads the company's strategy and product vision for its AI-driven performance marketing platform. Marco works with enterprise brands to rethink how marketing organizations launch and optimize campaigns using AI, helping teams move faster and make smarter, more adaptive decisions.

0:50Now, over his 18-year career, Marco has led product development for more than 25 products, with the past decade focused heavily on digital advertising and measurement. He's held product roles across Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Pinterest, working on advertising platforms and data analytic systems at massive scale. And I'm very proud to call him my long-lost brother, my newfound friend. Marco, welcome to the show. Steve, thank you so much for having me. And I didn't realize how old I was until you just reminded me. Thank you. No nap taking during this during the show. All right. So deal. I make a promise.

1:26But you see you drifting off. I got you. OK. I cannot wait. I mean, we have had such our conversations off air. Anyway, we're going to start with some myth busting. Let's do it. Right. And I can't wait because you shared some myth that you want to bust. And I want to tee these up and then get out of your way because I can't wait for you to bust some myths. First one, AI and marketing is really just a cost-cutting play. So the first question is, why do you think companies are still framing AI primarily through cost reduction? Yeah, man, I got to hold back a little bit, but not too much. The New York City kid in me is ready to go.

2:00Look, I think the answer is it's an obvious play, right? It obviously feels like it's cost-cutting. And in this world where there's so much opportunity around performance, there's opportunity around what's being driven in the market. I think it just sells what the capability of the technology is a little short. For me, the real opportunity is performance. It's really about driving more effective outcomes. And the cost cutting is just sort of the first step of that, if you will. So, Steve, I'm curious as you see it, but when you talk down to a CFO, I think it's just obvious to start with, here's where we think we can cut budgets.

2:39Here's where we think we can get more efficiency. And I think that's just been the narrative that's taken over. The reality for me is it's really about performance and sort of the impact you're going to make to the business by driving that efficiency and scaling. I love that. I completely agree with your answer, which is a good segue into Romy. Why is that becoming the metric more and more boards, if not C-levels, I should care about now? I think if you start with where we came from, ad spend, right? It was you as a marketer got a bunch of money to dedicate to advertising. And everybody focused on return on ad spend.

3:11And this idea of ROAS became a very simple shortcut, especially in digital where we had attribution, right? 20 years ago, a small search engine convinced the world that if somebody clicked on an ad, somebody bought something. And the birth of last click and the birth of return on ad spend came out. And it's funny because if you think about where we started with TV advertising and print advertising, attribution had less of a strongman hold on sort of the outcomes effect. But over the last 20 years with digital, it's all been about attributable conversions and your return on your ad spend. The problem with that is it's completely mislooking at or misguided by the total opportunity of the pie.

3:49As a marketer, you're given a budget for not just headcount, not just your marketing tech stack, but your photo shoots, the ability for your team to execute all of these campaigns, your third party partners, your agencies. All of that is a marketing investment. A piece of that is on advertising. So if you're able to take a step back and look at your full budget as a CMO, you're going to be able to apply not just the efficiencies, but performance outcome gains across the entire spectrum. So if you're only looking at the ad spend, I think you're doing it wrong. You've got to look at the total budget because you're seeing not just the cost cutting and efficiencies, but the performance outcomes and sort of that 10x scale really on the entire budget.

4:29And in a world of AI, as a CMO, as a leader, you've got to really rethink your entire investment. You're rethinking your org chart. You're rethinking how you're set up. You're not doing the brand versus performance as we did 15 years ago. And don't get me started on that one. You're thinking about your total marketing investment. And I think this idea of Romi is going to become the future as now everything needs to be trivial. Now I need to measure the effectiveness of all parts of my investment. It's fascinating why CMOs, I'm going to ask you to speculate, but do some CMOs either not know how to look at all this?

5:01They don't want to look at all this. They're afraid to look at all this. Because to me, the more you open this aperture up, if you will, the more you can validate and show your CFO and CEO, like, hey, not only do I deserve what you're giving me, I could use more and I have the proof to show it. Does that make sense? It does. Look, I actually think the CMO job might be one of the hardest in the C-suite. I think the pressures from on high, from the board to say, hey, deploy AI and get efficient. Your CFO is looking for attributable dollars in terms of how you're driving the business. Your budgets are usually the first to get cut.

5:38And over the last 10 years, every CMO knows, the tenure has changed quite a bit. I think it's a really, really difficult job and they have to balance what can I drive in the short term? But then you and I know this, brand building is a long-term effect. So how do you think about short-term outcomes, short-term deliverables, especially at a publicly traded company where every 90 days you got to go back to the street and talk about revenue. And you're thinking about outcomes of how you change hearts and minds about your brand for many types of generations, different demographics, different psychographics.

6:08I think that's a really difficult position to be in. I think there are some CMOs, they get that their neck is on the line and they're just like, screw it, I'm going to do it my way. And I'm going to rejigger the whole thing. And those, in my opinion, are the CMOs that are really starting from the ground up, the ones that are curious about AI, The ones that are investing in the technology and the tools, they're just not on a chair telling their teams what to do. They're actually investing themselves and becoming very proficient. And when a CMO understands what's capable, that's how the tops down leadership comes out, where they can guide their teams and really set the bar and set the tone.

6:42So I think the CMO position right now is evolving very quickly. And I think the best CMOs are the ones that in and of themselves, they're in the system, they're in the technology, and they're becoming more proficient as a user, as a technologist themselves. Because as you know this, the barrier to entry is low. Anybody can go teach themselves anything at this point. So with the capabilities around generation and analytics, data analysis, and really thinking about not just first party data, but really unstructured data. How do I take all of that and create a memory, a brain? That's where the CMOs are going, in my opinion.

7:18And to me, what a time to be alive because you can finally start to do these things. Yeah, yeah, it really is. And it's just your points are so spot on about the pressure, but the pressure is there to be relieved because AI gives them that tool to literally do whatever they want. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it's not. Anyway, we can keep going on that myth. I want to move to the second myth because there's a lot more to cover. Myth number two, AI generated creative hurts brands. Now, I think you're on record or you've said that it's not bad creative hurts brands. I mean, bad creative is what hurts brands, not AI itself.

7:52Look, I don't think much has changed, right? We were talking about our age earlier, and I'm old enough to remember where people lost their minds around magazine covers getting photoshopped. Today, you can't show me an image anywhere on your phone, on your desktop, on TV, anywhere that hasn't been touched up. It's part of society today. I think the how you get to great creative is evolving. And the beauty of this is there's so many pieces of technology that allow you to scale from image, video, content. And that, to your point, that's a superpower to a CMO. They can literally build anything with their technology stacks and their people around them.

8:31To me, it's what's your standard? What do you stand for? Let's paint a really dystopian picture. in a world where you can create truly anything, you know where brands differentiate? In their DNA. Who are you? Who do you speak to? Who are you consumers? What are your beauty standards? What do you think about representation? It's not the technology that's the problem. What is the outcome and the output that you want to put out? And to me, when a CMO tells me AI is going to hurt their brand, I question that because to me, no, no, no, the AI is going to give you more capabilities. You still own your brand.

9:05Now, I don't think you should have an AI in the box and an AI marketer in the box that just spits things out without you noticing. You really have to care about what is your creative leadership? What is your brand aesthetic? What is your expression? None of that's changed. Right. The technology just allows you to do all of that a lot faster and more importantly, with a huge aperture of creative content. That feels like a weapon, not something to shy away from. Correct. And how to use that weapon, of course. Correct. And by the way, we've always been about human curation. One of my favorite shows, Mad Men, Don Draper, right?

9:35This was the start of advertising in its heyday. I'm not Don Draper. I'm a colorblind engineer from New York City, dude. I have no idea what ads are going to work ahead of time. I'm going to help you figure that out. But CMOs and VPs of brands and brand owners still need to have a perspective of what they want to go stand for in the market. And to me, that's never been more true than now and for the next 10 years. And that's the exciting part about the market and the industry today. Yeah. Yeah. Staying on this myth about AI gender-creative brands, do you think AI is exposing weak creative leadership more than weak creative itself?

10:08I won't say weak. I will say there's an opportunity to be lazy, right? And by the way, let me switch the conversation. Forget marketing. Let's talk about legal. Over the last two or three years, I have a lot of friends who are lawyers. Once a month in my WhatsApp group with some college friends, I'll get the article of a lawyer that submitted an AI creative brief and just didn't read it. And it started hallucinating and making up cases like that's lazy to me. So I think AI has the opportunity of making humans lazy. And I think that is dangerous. In the CMO world, you need to have the ownership of the outcome and the output.

10:43And I think most CMOs, especially those that care about their brands, they're doing that already. Now, with the opportunity to make a lot of these things so much easier, you've just got to invest in the curation and really understanding where that expression wants to go. And you need to be opinionated and have a point of view. The best brands, in my opinion, have a point of view. And now that you can create anything, now that your teams are creating anything, you really got to figure out, hey, what's our operating model? How do we actually go from so many thousands of pieces of content to the ones that we really care about?

11:13How do we test and learn? How do we know what resonates? And by the way, what resonates in Seattle, might not in New York, might not in Texas. So you have the opportunity to speak to people at a one-to-one level. And that's what true experiential marketing needs to become. And now that the capability is there, how are you going to go wield that? That to me is the danger. It's laziness, not weak, but taking advantage of the power that you have in your tool bit. That's a powerful move. Yeah. And, and it was like, you're reading my mind because I was literally about to ask you the open-ended question is AI making marketers lazy, but I love how you just take out marketers.

11:48It's just all of us, right? We all have our tool choice, chat, Claude, whatever. And I use it. You use it. We all use it. Totally. Right? But I mean, I find myself now going, hey, chat, what should I have for dinner? Right? This is what I have in my house. And I don't know if that's a good example of being lazy as opposed to just productive. Specifically when it comes to marketers, I have a big fear. And I think over the next 12, 18, 24 months, the brands, you're going to see those who were lazy get quote unquote called out, in my opinion. I agree with you. And by the way, to your point, how you want to deploy the technology is totally up to you.

12:26You might not care what you eat, but there are lots of people out there who really care about what they're going to have today. And that's where they want to spend their creative juices. They want to make recipes. And AI is helping them do the same. And, you know, Steve Jobs is very famous for saying, I don't care about what I wear. I just want to wear the same thing every day because I just need that idea out of my brain so I can go focus on other things. That's the beauty of AI. You get to decide. And to me, in a world where your teams can create anything, your teams can concept anything, you should have more gumption.

12:55You should have more point of view as to what you want to go stand for because it's so easy to go deliver. So I think humans have the opportunity to be lazy always. And some laziness is good. Some is bad. Open LinkedIn. Everybody's writing with AI. But you can also tell when there's people who are not even reading their content. And that to me is lazy. So I don't care how you start, but you've got to stand by the outcome. You have to stand by the output. And to me, the journey is up to you. How we use the technology is up to you. But whatever you post, whatever you put out there, you better sign your name to it.

13:28And if you didn't read it and if you didn't love it, that's on you. Exactly. That's just it. That's the mic drop right there. It's on you. Okay. Third and final myth. The fastest AI adopters win. So first, why do you believe the tools themselves will eventually commoditize? Yeah, I think there's a moment in time we're having right now where like it's the wild, wild west and building it. By the way, as an engineer, I love it. Our team loves it. We can build anything. Our ability to execute at a faster clip is almost a thousand X than it was even a few months ago. And that's a really exciting place to be.

14:01But that also means you're going to see the rise and in my opinion, the fall of hundreds, if not thousands of point solutions. And the danger behind that is everybody and their mom is disrupting AI and marketing and all these different fields. You as a marketer can't just grab every tool that comes off the shelf and like bring it in because you're being forced to test it. You have to be methodical on what problem you want to go solve. And more importantly, you have to organize around the workflow of your teams. Adopting AI quickly is actually not the goal. The goal is to drive performance or to drive an outcome or to drive revenue for your business.

14:33AI is going to help you go do that. So if you're just running to go running, I think that's dangerous. Start with a problem, figure out what you want to go solve for, understand your company, understand your ethos. Do you have a two-person team or a 200-person team? And go find the platform that's built for how you want to operate. And then have a point of view on what good looks like. How are you measuring the effectiveness? Is it speed? Is it outcomes and performance? Is it the ability to change and disrupt how your organization's working? That's totally up to you. But AI fluency is a leadership goal and a challenge.

15:06How you allow your team to adopt is really up to you. And in my opinion, it's not speed, it's memory. How are you developing capabilities that your team is knowing and learning constantly, this test and learn? That is the true unlock of AI. But it's got to be around human. And to me, the speed is one thing. Yes, I love people diving in. But do you methodically know the problem you're going to go solve? That should be the focus. You just used the word human. And I'm going to assume this is going to be part of your answer to the next question, which is this. If everybody has access to the similar or same technology, where does and will the real advantages come from?

15:44I think it's two. I think one we spoke about already, which is what we call the brand DNA. What is your brand expression? What do you stand for? One of my favorite chefs from the world, I'm a foodie, is David Chang. And he has a great story when somebody goes into Momofuku and they ask for a dish. He's like, you know who serves that dish? The restaurant two blocks down. You don't have to be everything for everybody. You have to be who you want to be for your customers. And I think in today's world, the brand DNA, what brands stand for, that's the true position of differentiation. I think two is really the customer experiences that you're delivering, both in marketing, both in real life and in person, and really how you impart what your message is to me as a consumer and how I feel about your brand.

16:27I think those two pieces are going to be the moment of how the best brands survive or how the best brands evolve, who have the best products, who can explain and articulate in a way that resonates to me, and who cares about the things and the values that I care about as a consumer. At the end of the day, I believe in a capitalistic society. We all vote with our dollars. So the ability to leverage these tools to do that better and faster, I think, is really important. But you can't lose sight of who you are as a brand. And if you try to be everything, you're going to be nothing. You've got to be the thing that you want, the brand that stands for what the consumers are looking for in your voice.

17:05That's where the laziness is. That's a real, like it's right around the corner to just go, okay, this has worked. I'm just going to plug this into AI and it's just going to keep working, right? As opposed to in the past pre-AI where a brand would adjust, rightfully so, based on what the market is telling them. That's right. What's funny to me about the world today of AI, my favorite A word, which is not AI, it's authenticity. Everybody cares about, oh, AI is not authentic. It's inauthentic. And my point is, actually, no, authenticity is defined by you. It is defined by what the brand stands for.

17:39And in that world, you can test many messages, but those messages have to be on brand. They can't say wildly different things. And they can't say totally different messages about what the brand is standing for and left to right. They have to have an ethos. Now, the words you use, the way it shows up, the positioning of your logo, the imagery, all that can be tested. But the core message you want to go deliver, it has to come from a brand. And if you're depending on AI to develop that, I think that's going to be a difficult place. You can have AI help you evolve it and to scale it, but it has to come from what the brand wants to stand for.

18:15And I largely believe that's an opportunity for humans to really decide that. Yeah. Okay. I think I've heard you, you describe AI as the quote, Iron Man suit for marketers. What does that mean? One, I'm a Marvel nerd. I love comic books. For years, we've been all talking about human in the loop. And I think one day that just rubbed me the wrong way. And I think I was in a customer meeting and I said, what do you hear when you hear human in the loop? I was talking to CMO and they said, it just feels like everything is happening around me, but I'm just one piece of the pie, right? I'm just like a simple link in the entire ecosystem.

18:50And that doesn't feel right. And I was like, yeah, I totally disagree and probably just got done watching Iron Man 2 for the 100 ,000th time with my daughter. And I realized, no, marketing is still, at the end of the day, human storytelling, humans telling other humans about what they stand for as a brand. And it is a very human experience. The Iron Man suit is really about the human as the pilot getting 1 ,000x more powerful. You're faster. You're stronger. You can do things that a sole human by themselves could not. That's what I believe AI to be. You put it around the human pilot, and now you are scaling your speed.

19:25You are scaling what is possible. You are scaling the human creativity, the human brain and its capabilities at a clip that has never been seen before in human existence. And those that are realizing that they have to sit in the Iron Man suit. And by the way, a lot of machinery, a lot of technology, a lot of capabilities inside that suit. But the decision making is human. The decisions about what to go do and what to go after and what mission to go on if you really want to take the analogy to the next level, that is all human. And to me, the best marketing organizations, the CMOs today understand that.

19:59They still have to tell human storytelling. But how do you tie creative and performance? How do you test and learn? How do you drive outcomes for your business? That's where AI will really make it powerful for you. But it starts with the human. Yeah, I think I read somewhere AI adoption is stalling, right, to some degree. And I know we talked, you said, this isn't really a technology problem. It's an org chart problem. What did you mean by that? I think the number was 95 % of pilots. This was in Q4 of last year. 95 % of AI pilots never made it to production. And I think there's two problems that cause that outcome or that result.

20:33Number one, AI is being forced on every marketer's throat, right? It's coming from the board. It's coming from the CEO. They're saying, you got to use AI, you got to use AI. And when you push it down without a real mantra, without a real goal, you're going to get a lot of things that are just stalling. I think if you start with the problem and the outcome you want to go drive and methodically decide how are we going to go solve that with AI, it just changes the ballgame. Versus to the point earlier, let's just run into the race. I think the second piece is, and I kind of alluded to this earlier, if you're just expecting your teams to come up bottoms up with ideas of where AI is going to work best, you're going to get a lot of point solutions.

21:10You're going to build the Frankenstack and you're going to get a lot of desperate teams doing things in silos. And that feels like the opposite of efficiency. No wonder it's going to fail. My AI system over here has got to MCP and talk to this AI. What are we doing? You need a end-to-end platform that brings the teams together. And that has to come from the top. The CMO has to lead by example. They have to be steeped in these tools. They have to be very detail-oriented around the problem they want their organization to solve. So if you can't create the swim lanes, the ability to invest in the technology, into the capabilities, into the skill sets, and really have that as a top-down mandate, that's the thing that's going to make this excel.

21:49So I think in 2025, we saw a lot of people rushing to pilots. My expectation in 2026, people are going to kind of do a little bit of a reset and figure out how to deploy this in action and seeing what's durable. And we're seeing in our own organization, there's a lot of opportunity, both on how you build, on how you market, on how you work with your customers. There's no shortage of things that can change, but you have to be very specific on the outcome you want to go drive and solve for that in a very methodical way from the organization. That comes from the top. You use the word I use all the time.

22:19And I jokingly say it's a reason it's a four-letter word, literally and figuratively, is the word silo. And it's always been to death for any brand. in any generation, right? This is no different, but it's almost exacerbated in our world right now of AI because it's so easy and you mentioned all the point solutions. It's so easy for a CMO to go buy that. Oh, we need to go buy that. And then they just start working in the silos. And next thing you know, like you said, that Frankenstein is not talking to one another. It's a really slippery slope. And again, I think people's hearts are in the right places.

22:51People mean well. So if my boss was telling me, go deploy AI, I'm going to go figure out what it is that I do and what are the things that exist out there that I can go try AI. And I see why this is happening. And to the point earlier, this is why it's got to be a different conversation. You need to have people who are steeped in the technology, what it's capable of. You need to have folks out there trying different things and seeing where the market is evolving. But before you bring anything inside, you've got to be very clear with the organization. Hey, what are we trying to accomplish? What's the real goal?