In a recent conversation, Didit’s Kevin Lee sat down
with Brianna Gays, Chief Marketing Officer at Smartly, to unpack how AI
and changing entertainment habits are reshaping modern marketing. The result is
a clear message to marketers: your media plan, creative strategy, and operating
model all need a rethink.
Entertainment Is Now an Ecosystem
Consumers no longer experience “TV” or “digital” as separate worlds. They
bounce fluidly across Netflix, YouTube, Roku, Reddit, Roblox, and other
platforms—often in a single sitting.
Brianna argues that if marketers are still planning in
channel silos (TV over here, social there, CTV somewhere in between) they’re
out of step with how people actually consume content. This convergence is
forcing brands to think more holistically about reach, frequency, and
storytelling across the entire entertainment ecosystem.
Content as Discoverability Infrastructure
One of the biggest shifts Brianna highlights is the renewed importance
of owned, earned, and organic content. As large language models and
AI-powered search engines become key discovery mechanisms, brand content is no
longer just “nice to have”—it’s infrastructure.
Search, digital PR, and crawlable social content now feed
not only traditional rankings, but also AI-driven summaries and recommendations.
Marketers are starting to rebalance budgets away from purely lower-funnel
performance and toward the content engines that make them visible in these new
environments.
Events as Evergreen Content Engines
Kevin and Brianna also discussed how events have evolved from one-off
moments into content-generation hubs. Flagship gatherings now serve as
factories for talks, clips, testimonials, and thought leadership pieces that
live on long after the closing keynote.
For Smartly.io, events are designed to create material that
can be repurposed across LinkedIn, paid media, and nurture programs, extending
their impact across the funnel. The constant, though, is authenticity:
attendees still expect real conversations and genuine peer connection, something
AI cannot fake.
Creative Abundance vs. Real Variety
Despite “creative abundance,” many brands still lack the variety and
freshness needed to keep different audience segments engaged, especially
in high-frequency environments like CTV and streaming.
Brianna points to AI as a way to cut non-working production
time and dollars, enabling teams to generate more tailored variations without
exploding costs. With the right brand guidelines and guardrails, AI can help
refresh creative faster, match messages to moments, and support better testing
and optimization.
From Command-and-Control to Training the System
A key mindset shift is happening at the leadership level. Historically,
CMOs and creative leads have operated in a command-and-control model—personally
approving each asset. Brianna believes the new job is to train systems
rather than micromanage outputs.
By codifying brand rules and examples, leaders can let AI
act as a copilot, generating and adapting creative at scale while still staying
on-brand. This is especially impactful in Connected TV (CTV), where
real-time frequency control, cross-channel intelligence, and performance
measurement are turning what used to be a pure brand play into a measurable,
optimizable channel.
Avoiding “AI Slop”
Both Kevin and Brianna warn against the rise of “AI slop:” generic,
uncanny, or overly synthetic creative that erodes trust.
Consumers are increasingly wary of synthetic humans and
hyper-personalized experiences that feel invasive. They’re far more comfortable
with AI working behind the scenes—tweaking layouts, testing colors, or scaling
variants—as long as the people and stories they see still feel real and brands
are transparent about how AI is used.
For Brianna, the answer is an “AI first, AI every day” mindset inside teams, paired with a relentless focus on authenticity in external-facing experiences. AI should amplify the marketer’s craft, not replace it.