The Complete Feed

Marketers have more customer, commerce, media, and third-party data than ever—but turning it into usable insight remains slow and complex. This piece explores how agentic data orchestration can simplify access, embed governance, connect distributed data environments, and help business users move faster from question to insight to action.

After two decades in Silicon Valley, veteran marketer Gregory Kennedy moved to Seattle, went independent, and built Vibe Your SaaS—using AI, memes, sharp opinions, and relentless publishing to turn a small online presence into millions of monthly impressions. Brett and Rio ask why memes work, when controversy becomes a liability, whether AI is liberating marketing or flooding it with sameness, and what Seattle must do to become a truly founder-friendly city.

Kurt Donnell left M&A law for digital media and became the first CEO of Freestar, helping scale it into a global publisher monetization business. Now the open web faces a harder test: declining search traffic, AI answer engines, fragmented AdTech, and advertiser dollars moving to simpler closed platforms. Can radical transparency restore trust, what publishers should demand from AI companies, and whether Freestar’s new pubOS creates real leverage—or merely manages declines.

Advertising legend Rishad Tobaccowala joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, reinvention, agencies, and the future of work. Drawing on four decades at Publicis, Rishad explores why AI transformation is really organizational transformation, how careers are becoming more fluid, and what human skills will matter most in an age of abundant intelligence.

We spent years centralizing customer data—then started shipping copies of it back out across the marketing ecosystem. The Great Customer Data Boomerang explores a better model for audience activation: keep intelligence close to the source, move fewer records, and give downstream platforms the signals they actually need to act.

Is AI really going to kill us all? From Anthropic’s latest warnings to rogue AI agents, recursive self-improvement and calls to halt advanced AI development, doomerism is having a moment. But how much is legitimate risk—and how much is panic? We examine the evidence, the assumptions behind extinction scenarios, and why taking AI safety seriously doesn’t require believing the apocalypse is coming.

AI agents can access more data than ever—but who decides what they are allowed to do with it? Brett and Rio sit down with SafeGuard Privacy CEO Richy Glassberg to explore why privacy is becoming a permission layer for the AI era. They discuss consent, vendor diligence, machine-readable authority, and how auditable privacy infrastructure can help companies innovate responsibly while building customer trust.

Everyone is talking about AI… but very few people have spent decades building AI systems that millions actually use. In this episode, Zohar Karu, Head of AI at Taelor and former Chief Data Officer at eBay, joins Signal & Noise to explore why AI transformation is really organizational transformation. We discuss personalization, enterprise adoption, trust, and why the companies that win with AI won’t necessarily have the best models—they’ll build the products and cultures peopl

Fern Potter left a senior ad-tech leadership role to co-found Intelligent Assistance around a bold premise: AI works best when it expands human judgment rather than pretending to replace it. She joins Signal & Noise to discuss why AI is not a strategy, how companies move from pilots to commercial impact, what programmatic advertising can teach us about unchecked automation, and why the future belongs to organizations that combine machine speed with human context, creativity,

Dollar General may be one of America’s most underestimated media businesses. Austin Leonard, VP & GM of DG Media Network, joins Signal & Noise to reveal how DG is turning 21,000+ stores, billions of transactions and rich first-party data into a powerful retail media platform—and using AI to transform targeting, measurement, in-store media and customer experiences.

Programmatic advertising automated the transaction. AI may automate the negotiation. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-Founder of PubX, for a provocative conversation about agentic trading, publisher monetization, and what happens when AI agents begin representing both sides of the advertising market.

AI is making it possible to replace clunky dashboards, spreadsheets, and repetitive workflows with purpose-built internal applications. Lucas Longacre shares how he’s building hyper-focused tools at Inlightened—and why the next frontier of enterprise AI may be empowering teams to build software around the way they actually work.

Digital commerce is changing fast as AI reshapes how people discover and buy products. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Bryan House, CEO of Elastic Path, to discuss AI-powered product discovery, agentic commerce and the future of ecommerce. They explore B2B opportunities, composable commerce, payments, retail media and why AI could dramatically reduce the time and cost of implementing commerce platforms.

Four years into the AI era, intelligence has arrived—but the revolution we were promised hasn't. AI can pass the Turing Test, summon something resembling a “country of geniuses,” and transform how millions work, yet society remains remarkably familiar. Maybe AI isn't overhyped. Maybe we're simply underestimating how long it takes humanity to rebuild the world around a revolutionary technology.

In this special edition of Signal & Noise Live at AI Con, Lucas Longacre sits down with AI GovOps co-founder Ken Johnston to discuss what it really takes to scale AI safely. They explore the risks of “demo theater,” why companies need stronger testing, security and observability, and how AI is reshaping software development. Ken also explains why human experience and judgment remain essential as companies race to adopt increasingly powerful AI tools.

For years, the AI race has focused on building the smartest model. But the next competitive advantage may be the data and context that make every business unique. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Snowflake’s Eddie Drake to explore AI governance, the Marketing Context Layer, and protecting proprietary intelligence. They also discuss Data Clouds, AI agents, token economics, and what the future of enterprise AI could look like.

As AI reshapes personalization and customer engagement, consent can no longer live in a static compliance system. This article explores why permission is becoming the critical layer that determines whether customer data can be used responsibly—and how brands can build trusted, AI-ready customer intelligence.

Marketing technology and advertising are converging faster than ever. Anna Mourão, Global Marketing Technology and Customer Data leader with experience through four FORTUNE 500 companies , joins Signal & Noise to discuss how global brands activate first-party data, partner with media teams, navigate the evolving CDP landscape, and prepare for an AI-driven future. It's a candid, brand-side perspective on customer data, enterprise AI, and why the traditional MarTech stack is be

Advertising has never had more data, but less certainty. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Joanna Drews, Co-Founder & CEO of HyphaMetrics, joins Brett House and Rio Longacre to explore why traditional attribution is breaking down, what MMM still misses, and how AI, panels, and cross platform measurement are reshaping the future of advertising. Better decisions in the AI era start with better measurement.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing how marketers work—it’s redefining the profession itself. As AI automates execution, a new role is emerging: the Marketing Engineer. This article explores why marketing is becoming an engineering discipline, how AI is reshaping marketing organizations, and why the future belongs to those who can design intelligent systems where humans and AI work together to create customer value.