Ad Age Insider

In the AI era, company culture is the real differentiator. Ad Age's Senior Editor Adrianne Pascarelli breaks down the workforce gap nobody's solved, the AI overhype she's most suspicious of and the influencer disclosure loophole about to blow up in brands' faces. She also shares the three words marketers put in a live word cloud when asked to sum up the moment (humanity, insanity, never-ending change), and the one workforce question she's still trying to get answered.
Listen to the full conversation from Ad Age Insider wherever you're currently listening.

Rich Silverstein is stepping down as co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners after 43 years, with an AI hotline trained on his voice now fielding creative pitches in his place. Plus, Burger King turns its own product failures into ad material; Meta's Muse and Anthropic's Claude Commerce Blueprint push brands toward agentic holiday shopping prep; CampStudios, Pufferfish and StudioB pull creator-led work into agency rosters once reserved for traditional shops.
Host Parker Herren breaks down what each story means for marketers navigating agency succession, AI's expanding role in creative work, transparency as a trust-building strategy and the shift toward agentic commerce. Subscribe for weekly industry news roundups, plus biweekly deep-dive conversations with Ad Age reporters.
Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:
~Rich Silverstein steps away from Goodby Silverstein & Partners—inside the art director's storied career
~Rich Silverstein's unfiltered wisdom lives on in the AI-powered 'GPT Rich'
~Burger King's CMO on why the chain keeps turning failures into ad campaigns
~How brands should prepare for an agentic holiday shopping season
~Where creator-led agencies are winning work from traditional shops

Marketing budgets are tight across the board, but mid-size brands—companies roughly between $50 million and $1 billion in revenue—have been finding ways to make theirs work harder. Adrianne Pasquarelli, senior editor of CMO strategy and commerce at Ad Age, digs into how these brands operate with fewer resources, fewer layers of approval and a lot more speed. She breaks down what's driving bolder creative risks, how AI is showing up in unexpected ways and what bigger brands could actually learn from smaller ones.
Parker Herren talks with Pasquarelli about why mid-size CMOs are willing to take creative swings that bigger legal departments would shut down, how one baby food brand built an internal AI tool to keep its marketing on-brand without slowing anyone down and why leaner teams often mean less data and more gut instinct. It's a look at what happens when constraints force creativity instead of killing it. Subscribe to Ad Age Insider so you don't miss the next conversation.
Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:
~Introducing the 2026 Ad Age Mid Size Brand Leaders
~How mid-size marketers are turning budget constraints into a competitive edge
~What 15 mid-size brand leaders are prioritizing—and cutting—right now

X&O co-founders Brett Banker and Eric Segal play a game of overrated or underrated, dishing on the holding company vs. independents debate, spec work, content creators and more. Check out Ad Age's full conversation with the duo in the first episode of Agencies on Record, a new quarterly podcast from Ad Age.
 Don't miss the full conversation with Brett Banker and Eric Segal

Develop the strategic idea, then step back—the client can take it in-house, hand it to another agency or bring X&O back to build it themselves. That's the split that co-founders Brett Banker and Eric Segal say powers their sprint model: five-to-six-day timelines, a top-to-top rule that puts C-level talent in the room from day one and a hard "no" on pitching for free, even against a strong prospect.
In Agencies on Record, Ad Age's new quarterly podcast, the pair also break down how their model scales into more complex categories, including an eight-week version built for healthcare's regulatory hurdles. Banker and Segal explain why they've stayed deliberately small—capping the agency at roughly 50 people—even as revenue climbed from $4.2 million in 2024 to more than $8 million in 2025, driven by fixed-fee project work with clients including Coca-Cola and Verizon and talent like Heated Rivalry's Connor Storrie. 
The duo weigh in on Dentsu's move into the sprint space with its relaunched 360i unit, the challenges of maintaining focus inside a holding company, and why they've trademarked their own answer to the traditional agency-of-record model: what they call "answers on repeat." They also explain their hard line against speculative pitching, even when a prospective client all but promises the win.
Dig deeper
~Read the Small Agency Playbook
~Why agencies are adopting sprint models and how they work
~How small agencies choose the right pitches—and prepare to win
~Agency reviews in 2030—24 leaders predict what the marketing pitch process will look like
~CMO Survival Guide: What CMOs want from agencies—3 ways to improve relations