Advertise on podcast: Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli

Marketers know how to make a purchase easy, turn a choice into a default, and use social cues to influence behavior. What happens when we apply those same tools to ourselves? Margherita Petrone, enterprise account director at Zappi, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explore how consumer behavior principles can help us examine our routines and make desired changes easier. They discuss what calendars and spending patterns reveal about our priorities, when to add or remove friction, and how the people around us shape what feels normal. The conversation also considers when planning becomes a way to manage anxiety and why a habit deserves a review even when we have become very good at maintaining it. From putting running shoes beside the bed to slowing down an impulse purchase, the episode offers practical ways to use skills marketers already have in their own lives.

For decades, marketers have measured media down to the decimal while judging creative largely on instinct. Alex Collmer, founder and executive chairman of Vidmob, has spent nearly a decade trying to change that by turning creative decisions into data. Collmer explains how creative data can reveal why an ad works, not simply whether it worked, and how brands can measure creative performance against outcomes ranging from brand recall to sales. He also discusses what marketers risk when they hand advertising over to black-box AI systems such as Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max, whether generative AI will push brands toward creative sameness, and why proprietary creative intelligence may become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage.

Young consumers can be tired of juggling streaming service subscriptions and still think the content is worth paying for. They can worry about social media and still use it to discover shows, encounter news, and decide which films deserve to be seen in the theater. In this episode, MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss research on entertainment and news among 1,500 consumers aged 13 – 39 in the US and Canada, plus a preview of their latest research into moviegoing trends. They discuss how TikTok and YouTube influence TV discovery, why getting news on social media does not necessarily mean abandoning established news organizations, and how costs shape Gen Z choices.

Many companies are under pressure to use AI, but how many can show what their AI investments are doing for the business? On this episode of Up Next, Gabriella Mirabelli talks with Anna Convery, CMO of Verint, a customer experience automation company that works with more than 80 of the Fortune 100. They discuss why so many AI pilots stall before reaching production, how marketers should measure AI success, and why the right starting point is the desired business outcome rather than the technology itself. Convery argues that companies should work backward from the outcome they want to achieve, then determine where AI can create meaningful value. The conversation also explores the role of human judgment in an AI-enabled workplace, why human expertise remains essential, and what organizations need to do to move AI from pilot projects into enterprise-wide use. Convery emphasizes the importance of executive sponsorship, training, organizational readiness, and a workforce that combines people and AI according to where each is most effective. In this episode: Why AI pilots often fail to make it into production How to measure AI by business outcomes rather than activity Why some common AI metrics are really vanity metrics How AI can augment human judgment rather than replace it Why companies don't necessarily need to rip and replace their existing technology How customer interactions can become a source of real-time market research Why CMOs need a seat at the table when AI reshapes customer experience What marketers should learn before engaging with contact center leaders Why AI is only as good as the data behind it

Word of mouth has long been one of marketing's most powerful tools, but marketers still struggle to understand what makes it effective. On this episode, we talk with Koen Pauwels, Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM), about how word of mouth has changed from the early days of social media to the age of influencers and generative AI. Pauwels' research offers several important lessons for marketers: Word of mouth can dramatically outperform paid marketing.  Not all word of mouth is equal.  Influencer marketing depends on the objective.  Online conversations are not necessarily representative.  Real buzz travels.  Generative AI makes third-party credibility even more important.  The takeaway for CMOs: word of mouth is too valuable to ignore, but too complicated to measure with a single social listening dashboard. Brands should cultivate genuine advocacy, understand what they are paying influencers to accomplish, and connect those investments to measurable business outcomes.

Dr. Cody Coleman built the benchmarks that got rival AI labs and hardware makers to agree on how to measure machine learning performance. Now, as founder and CEO of Coactive AI, he's tackling a harder problem: teaching AI to understand content the way people do, not just tag it. Cody joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain why general-purpose AI models fall short in advertising, how a benchmark like MediaPerf changes the game, and where human judgment must stay in the loop, no matter how sophisticated the system gets.

Young consumers increasingly say they prefer shopping in physical stores. But that doesn't mean they're abandoning digital. MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, joins host Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss new research on how Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and millennials shop and manage money. They explore why the mall comeback is more complicated than the headlines suggest, how young consumers move fluidly between online and in-person shopping, and why AI is becoming part of product research without taking over the purchase itself. The conversation also looks at mobile wallets, changing financial behaviors, and a persistent gender gap in investing. For brands, the opportunity may not be choosing between physical and digital, but understanding how young consumers move between them.

Anku Rani, a doctoral researcher at MIT and an MIT Tata Center fellow, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to challenge a working assumption in AI video production: that a better-looking clip is automatically a better clip. Rani built a culture score that separates identity, behavior, and context, then tested it against leading video generation models and against real viewers from nine countries. The results complicate how brands should think about choosing a video model for global campaigns, especially once cinematic polish and cultural accuracy start pulling in opposite directions.

Do process photos increase charity donations? Josh Lundberg, assistant professor of marketing at North Carolina Central University, joins Up Next to answer that question. His research with colleagues, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, finds that photos showing a charity's process, the actual steps taken to help someone, get people to donate more than the standard before-and-after photo. Gabriella and Josh talk through why this works, when it doesn't, and what any charity can do about it right away.

Jack Myers, media ecologist, futurist, and Peabody Award-winning author, joins Up Next to argue that AI has not solved the judgment problem in business; it has hidden it. As intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, discernment becomes the scarce asset, and Myers explains why organizations keep outsourcing trust to algorithms instead of building it in people. The conversation covers the coming collapse of agency holding companies, why hiring processes filter out the humans who matter most, and what CMOs should stop, start, and continue doing with their media budgets. A direct look at what AI changes, and what it doesn't.

Dan Coates, CEO and co-founder of YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain why the youth research firm built a direct connector into Claude and other similar gen AI systems. Coates describes YPulse's move toward what he calls decision support infrastructure: survey data atomized down to the individual respondent, queryable alongside a client's own internal data. The reports and question design that built the business haven't gone away; the connector is a new path into that same research. The conversation covers data provenance, the EU AI Act's consent requirements, and why Coates believes AI models are becoming a distribution channel for research vendors.

Scott Goodson founded StrawberryFrog, a global agency built on a philosophy he calls movement marketing. In this episode, he and Gabriella Mirabelli trace that framework from its origins through decades of application across healthcare, automotive, consumer goods, and fintech. Goodwin explains why the building blocks of any real movement include dissatisfaction and a named nemesis, and why brands that skip those elements tend to produce noise rather than momentum. The conversation covers Pampers, Northwell Health, Smart car, and a recent Visa campaign that generated 20,000 organic posts without paid media.

Rod Duclos, Associate Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business School at Western University, joins Up Next to discuss research published in April 2026 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM). The paper, co-authored with Amir Sepehri and Jonah Berger, draws on over 160,000 real complaints and five controlled experiments to show that the grammatical voice customers use when filing a complaint reliably predicts escalation risk before any explicit threat is made. The conversation covers the mechanism behind this signal, its limits, the looming AI confound, and what a CMO should do with it.

Joshua Lifrak spent five years building the mental skills program for the Chicago Cubs, including the 2016 World Series championship run, before taking that framework into the corporate world. His book, Win Today, lays out six daily practices for mental resilience and peak performance. In this episode, Lefrak breaks down each step, from framing how you meet the day to the science of why negativity is a protection mechanism, not a character flaw, and explains why willpower will always lose to systems.

Kaley Mullin is a sociologist and cultural insights practitioner who cofounded Cool Shiny Insights after serving as Head of Youth and Trends at YouTube and working on Disney's ABC Family to Freeform rebrand. In this episode, she explains what semiotics does for brand strategy, how cultural listening differs from social listening, and how to use the residual/dominant/emergent framework to time market moves. The conversation covers why brands consistently enter cultural spaces too late, what made Carhartt's cool-by-accident trajectory so instructive, and what organizational structures most marketing teams are still missing.