John has spent his career studying how people actually think, and his conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone who believes their marketing decisions are more rational than they are. In this episode, John explores how synthetic users built from cognitive science principles can fill the massive research gap that most teams quietly ignore, and why removing the human interviewer from the room might be the fastest way to finally hear the truth.More
Category Archives: AI
212: Tobias Konitzer: The Causal AI revolution and the boomerang effect in marketing decision science
Tobi challenged marketing’s fixation on prediction. He has built highly accurate LTV models, but accuracy alone does not move revenue. Marketing is intervention. Correlation shows patterns; causality tells you what happens when you pull a lever. That shift reshapes experimentation, explains why dynamic allocation can outperform static A B tests, and highlights how self learning systems can backfire or get stuck in local maxima.More
211: Jenna Kellner: Overcoming frankenstacks and AI uncertainty with first principles and business judgement
Jenna is a VP of marketing that can talk about the weeds of messy systems, uncertain decisions, and personal growth. You can’t hide from it, every company accumulates tech debt as teams rush to hit revenue targets. She frames tech debt as a leadership responsibility and urges executives to reinvest in core systems when patchwork begins to outweigh building. More
210: Ronald Gaines: 6 Things the next generation of marketing ops leaders must learn
Ronald shares a framework for marketing operations leaders to move from reactive support into proactive systems authority by building influence through measurable credibility, structured intake processes, and disciplined governance. It argues that operational work should be managed like a product with clear boundaries, documented standards, and strong data discipline, which protects team capacity, prevents burnout, and makes impact visible to the business. More
209: Maria Solodilova: Why Adtech is really a marketplace with its own economics
Maria takes us on a guided tour across the adtech landscape from a bird’s-eye view, describing a real-time marketplace where mobile ad mediation converts app usage into revenue through auctions that price every impression. She explains how supply-side work at Yango Ads centers on SDK integration, auction behavior, and performance tradeoffs that directly shape earnings once systems operate in production.More
208: Anthony Rotio: Exploring causal context graphs and machine customers, starting in retail media networks
The casino floor never sleeps. Lights hum, cards shuffle, and people come not just to gamble but to feel alive. While other industries went digital overnight, casinos stayed grounded in human moments, and Blair’s mission has been to connect those experiences through smarter tech.More
206: The people who keep you standing (50 Operators share the systems that keep them happy, part 2)
Think about the relationships that matter most to you and treat them like they are part of your happiness infrastructure. Protect dinner where phones stay facedown. Call the person who steadies your nervous system instead of refreshing your inbox when stress spikes. Work will fill your calendar. But your humans will keep you upright.More
203: Jordan Resnick: How to distinguish fake traffic from real machine customers
Distinguishing fake traffic from real machine customers requires reading behavior. Jordan shows how AI-driven bots now scroll, click, and submit forms while inflating dashboards with activity that never converts. The signal lives in speed, sequencing, and follow-through. Teams that act protect the conversion point, block synthetic demand early, and report only after traffic earns trust.More
202: Aleyda Solís: AI search crawlability and why your site’s technical foundations decide your visibility
AI search is rewriting how people find information, and Aleyda explains the shift with clear, practical detail. She has seen AI crawlers blocked without anyone noticing, JavaScript hiding full sections of sites, and brands interpreting results that were never based on complete data.More
201: Scott Brinker: If he reset his career today, where would he focus?
Scott Brinker would build one deep specialty to judge AI’s confident mistakes, grow cross-functional range to bridge marketing and engineering, and lean into technical skills like SQL and APIs to turn ideas into working systems. More