Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself in the dynamic world of digital marketing as a member of the team here at Liquid. I’ve attended a wide range of industry events, conferences, networking meetups, and client summits which gave me a front-row seat to the evolving conversations shaping our field. I’ve also gotten to engage with professionals from all walks of life: CMOs of global brands, startup founders, in-house marketing managers, and fellow agency creatives. Every conversation, whether brief or in-depth, has offered a unique perspective on where our industry is headed and what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
With so many insights gathered from outside voices, I thought it was time to bring the conversation home. So, I sat down with three key members of Liquid’s leadership team to hear their take on some of the big questions I’ve been hearing out in the field. Our Executive Vice President Bret Ludlow, Vice President of Marketing Emily Massaro, and Vice President of Creative Jason Mastroianni all shared some perspectives on the state of the industry, the direction of our agency, and what excites them most about the work we do.
Their insights not only reflect years of leadership and experience but also shed light on the culture and vision that drive Liquid forward.
Are companies over-relying on AI?
Chris: This one came up a lot at the last event I attended. AI is clearly reshaping how we work—but is it being overused? Is it helping creativity—or threatening it?
Bret: I’d jump in but something tells me Jason wants this one…
Jason: Yeah, what a loaded question. My succinct answer is that yes companies are over-relying on generative AI, and yes, generative AI is threatening creativity. But, that doesn’t mean AI can’t help creativity if it’s used correctly. Of course, all these things are also connected to one another.
Without even getting into the serious ethics, copyright, and fair compensation implications of generative AI (and there are so many), here’s what I think.
Companies are over-relying on Gen AI because they fundamentally misunderstand what it’s good at. Or they genuinely want to use it for nefarious reasons because they think it’ll save a buck (hint: it won’t if the idea is to replace people or partners who are good at creative stuff).
It’s great for workflow augmentation, outright replacing certain steps in a workflow, initial idea generation, and information aggregation plus summarizing (though you have to be careful with hallucinations). On the first two, there are plenty of tools that creatives use every day, taking advantage of generative AI and improving workflows forever.
Yet so many companies want to use it to replace writers, make everyone a writer, replace designers, make everyone a designer, and believe it’s capable of producing fully composed things. It often can’t do that, and even when it can get that done, it’s profoundly mundane most of the time.
So now you have these companies over-relying on Gen AI and that over-reliance is what threatens creativity. By announcing to the world that you think something as complex and dynamic as creativity is replaceable with technology built on the very creativity you’re trying to replace, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on.
It creates an environment where, depending on your choice of phrasing, you’re either racing to the bottom because of quality issues or everything looking, sounding, and feeling the same, or you’re scaling mediocrity—at a breakneck pace. Regardless of how you say it, it's not good. This makes marketing completely homogenized, faster than ever before, across every industry. Most companies would say they want to do things to stand out, but one minute later will actively talk about using generative AI in the exact same way everyone else is to produce the same exact crap. There’s that cognitive dissonance again.
Discouraging up and coming professionals from creative fields not only dampens marketing, but our overarching culture as well. Hell, in a joint study with Carnegie Melon, Microsoft said that relying on Gen AI kills critical thinking skills. That is good for NO ONE.
As I said in a comment on a recent LinkedIn post I disagreed with: “I can’t think of many groundbreaking movements in history that suppressed creativity on their way to success.”
Gen AI has so much potential: in science, finance, coding, manufacturing, analytics, etc., and yes, even marketing. Let’s stop obsessing over the destruction of creativity (or trying to deceptively reframe what it is) and start not only using this stuff the right way but also positioning it a little more broadly.
Why do so many brands look and sound the same?
Chris: OK, here’s one I’ve been hearing a lot lately—from both clients and conference panels. Why do so many brands today just... sound the same?
Bret: Ah, the sea of sameness. Well for one, those are the brands that don’t work with us at Liquid...
Chris: Burn!
Bret: But seriously, there are many factors that contribute to this and each brand or industry that falls into this category probably has a different combination of them for their specific circumstances. I’ll rattle off a few:
Layers of bureaucracy within an organization siffling or handcuffing the creative process.
Companies that play it too safe and feel the need to make sure their brand or campaign “checks all the boxes” and follows all of the same “industry best practices” that each of their competitors do.
An overall rush to do things as cheaply and as quickly as possible. We’re no strangers to operating with a sense of urgency and being agile enough to get to market quickly to seize an opportunity. But it’s often important to stop to take a moment to explore a new creative concept or set a new direction and avoid the urge to always just repurpose last year’s campaigns.
Last but not least, as Jason spoke to, an overreliance on Gen AI tools to produce brand or campaign assets. Not only does that produce work that gets lost in the sea of sameness, but also it often damages the brand or business by performing poorly.
What does “brand purpose” actually mean in practice?
Chris: I wrote this one down and was excited to hear your take on this, Jason. Everyone’s talking about brand purpose... but what does that really mean in practice?
Jason: It’s existential. It’s the fundamental “why” you exist as a company. If you aren’t a ghoul, you probably don’t believe companies start for the sole purpose of turning a profit. Profit is a result—a result of providing something helpful, needed, entertaining, etc. The best companies have a reason for existing that’s built on honest motivation, core beliefs, and behaviors, and a unifying thread that guides how they operate.
That’s brand purpose.
Feel it deep, work hard to put it into words, and believe in it. Then you have one of the biggest parts of your brand strategy ready to rock.
Learn more about how defining your brand purpose can drive performance in this article, by Jason.
Are companies measuring the right things when it comes to marketing analytics or marketing attribution?
Chris: Emily, this one has your name all over it. When it comes to marketing analytics and attribution, are companies even measuring the right things?
Emily: The short answer? Sometimes yes, but often no.
A lot of companies are still measuring what’s easiest to measure—not what actually matters to the business. Things like reach and impressions can reflect a lot of activity in a dashboard or report, but they don’t always tell you what’s really working.
Attribution, in theory, should bring clarity. But in practice, it often brings confusion. There are too many models, too much noise, and not enough alignment on what success should look like.
What’s missing is a strategic filter. Before diving into analytics, we need to step back and ask: are we measuring progress toward real business goals—or just tracking activity? Marketing leaders who get this right build their measurement approach from the top down. They start with the business outcome, then identify the signals that matter most along the way.
That often means accepting some imperfection. Attribution isn’t a math problem to be solved—it’s a story to be understood. And the story doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. If we can get better at connecting dots—not just collecting data—we’ll spend less time debating what happened and more time making smart decisions about what to do next.
Is “storytelling” still a buzzword—or is it evolving into something more?
Chris: Let’s talk about storytelling. Is it still a thing... or has it become just an overused buzzword?
Jason: Poor “storytelling.” Just another innocent word that our industry decided to take, distort, and then flood our eyeballs and eardrums with for years, ruining what was probably some good intention originally.
Emily: Seriously! I’m sure Chris can attest to the fact that “AI” may have just ousted “storytelling” as the most used term at industry events over the last year or two.
Jason: I know. The funny thing is: Implemented correctly, storytelling in marketing is about the different ways people engage with you carrying the attributes of a good story—relatability, engaging, conversational, comforting. Good stories are universally appealing, part of our human experience. So much marketing for so many years felt slimy and “gave some ick.” So, this movement was about changing that, making marketing feel like something honest and good, not something trying to manipulate you. Deliver something that can create memories, and you’ll do much better with recall.
The problem is, many brands either did the same stuff they always did but used the word storytelling, thought it was simply about their brand story, or (and this is the worst) confused it with a everyone having a significant interest in their company’s history and “about us” content. That’s not to say the latter can’t be interesting, but it’s not what storytelling was meant to encompass.
Emily: Yeah, it was never just about your company’s origin story!
The other thing I’m hearing more and more from marketing leaders is this growing rub between having a strong story and actually being able to tell it consistently across platforms, touchpoints, teams. So it’s not just about the story—it’s about the systems that support storytelling.
That’s a real operational challenge. Especially as teams juggle video, social content, SEO-driven blog content, internal decks, sales collateral… the list goes on.
How do you build a story that can scale without it falling apart of getting watered down? That’s where I think this conversation will head next. It’s less about the concept of storytelling, and more about the discipline of it.
Why do some marketing leaders treat brand and performance like they’re in a custody battle?
Chris: Here’s a question I keep coming across. Why does there seem to be such a divide between brand and performance marketing—and why do they so often get treated like they’re in competition?
Jason: Because for years, companies (and marketers within companies) have decided to (or been forced to) measure and consider marketing’s overall effectiveness against all the things commonly associated with performance. The problem is that it doesn’t reflect reality in the slightest.
If I had to categorize it at a very high level, marketing is responsible for two major things: 1) Embedding into the brains of as many buyers in your category as possible. I read someone refer to this as “creating and maintaining mental availability” and I think that’s brilliant. 2) Activating buyers that are currently in-market for what you sell.
The first thing is brand building, the second, performance marketing. The problem is, what’s considered success is entirely mapped to the behaviors and metrics of the 2nd thing, even though these responsibilities could not be more different. Conversions, MQLs, pipeline health, opportunities won/lost, closed revenue — all things that couldn’t have less to do with responsibility #1.
This is bananas at face value, but if you dig a little deeper, it’s even worse:
At any given point in time, only about 5% of your possible buyers are actually in-market to buy what you sell. AND you’re not going to close all 5% even when you’re the best lead-generator-activator-conversion rate optimizer in the world.
That leaves at least 95% who are not going to buy, no matter what you do.
Layer in long, dynamic sales cycles to this, and the window for success is even smaller.
Guess which responsibility maps ENTIRELY to the 95%? It’s not performance marketing. It’s not the metrics of performance marketing. Does it sound like a good idea to make everything we do geared toward what is only happening 5% of the time? It shouldn’t.
The final kicker? Performance marketing is impossible to be great at without brand building. That’s because we buy from who we trust. Brand building (and that mental availability thing) is all about being known, being recallable — carving out a special little place in someone’s brain that makes them feel fuzzy. If you focus a significant amount of your effort on creating a space in a buyer’s brain when they are in the 95%, don’t you think you’ll have a much better shot at activating them when they join the 5%?
That’s brand building.
So at the end of the day, what do great marketing leaders really want from an agency partner?
Chris: Alright, let’s land this plane. When you think about the best client-agency relationships—what do great marketing leaders really want in a partner?
Bret: The great ones want a lot of the same things we want out of a client partner: Transparency, trust, willingness to push the boundaries, ability to think differently about an approach or a creative direction, collaboration—and to do it all with a positive mindset and with human beings you enjoy being around.
When all of that comes together, magic happens at the client and agency side of the partnership.
Emily: I’d underscore a lot of what you shared by saying the days of the “yes agency” and the “order takers” are over—or should be. Great marketing leaders want partners who challenge lazy assumptions, poke holes in weak briefs, and bring ideas that actually make things happen. They want rigor in the thinking and, to quote Bret, magic in the execution.
And above all, they want someone who gives a damn! About the business, the brand, and the outcome.
Want to continue the discussion?
Reach out to me on LinkedIn! I’d love to hear your take.