The New Era of Advertising: What’s Now, What’s Next

The session “The New Era of Advertising: What’s Now, What’s Next” at Smartly Advance in New York brought together Andy Webb of Uber, Brian Borkowski of Fox Corporation, and Eddie Revis of Magnolia Bakery. Moderated by Brianna Gays of Smartly, the discussion explored how brands can navigate shifting consumer expectations, balance creativity with automation, and build advertising that drives both performance and brand equity.

Consumers are moving faster than brands

Laura Desmond’s keynote had set the tone earlier in the day: nine in ten consumers now use AI, nearly half every day. Against that backdrop, panelists agreed that customer expectations are evolving at a pace many brands struggle to match.

Revis put it bluntly: authenticity has become non-negotiable. Shoppers expect brands to deliver a genuine exchange of value, not just a message. That means turning marketing into a process of constant iteration - testing, learning, and scaling at the speed of culture. For Magnolia Bakery, the challenge is ensuring that when a consumer asks an AI for “the best things to do in New York for 48 hours,” the brand shows up in the list, right alongside landmarks and museums.

Automation and the human touch

Automation is indispensable for scale, but panelists stressed that it must be balanced with human creativity.

Webb described how Uber, active in 70 countries, relies on automation and AI to adapt campaigns across markets and languages. Yet the creative spark still comes from people. His teams look to cultural cues, a trending TikTok checklist or a local reference, and then use AI tools to scale the idea quickly into multiple formats.

For Revis, the human element is what makes Magnolia’s products matter. “We make cupcakes, we make banana pudding, we celebrate birthdays and breakups,” he said. Automation can speed up workflows and ensure relevance, but it cannot replicate the emotional touch of bakers, customers, and the stories behind them.

At Fox, Borkowski faces a unique test: launching a new streaming brand within a portfolio of icons like Fox News, Fox Sports, and NFL on Fox. The task is to raise awareness of the platform while respecting loyalty to sub-brands. His team has built toolkits that allow creative teams to work fast without losing fidelity to audience nuances. Automation and creative intelligence, he said, can help refine and adapt ideas but they do not replace originality.

Blurring the lines between brand and performance

One of the strongest themes was the rejection of the old divide between brand advertising and performance marketing.

Revis explained how Magnolia’s teams are structured like a “three-legged stool”: product development, marketing, and sales. Designers and marketers are expected to walk into meetings with retailers like Target or Walmart and speak fluently about packaging performance, sales velocity, and expected impact. Creativity and commerce are no longer separate lanes.

Borkowski echoed the point from Fox’s perspective. Early in a launch cycle, every campaign must pull double duty driving immediate sign-ups while also building the brand story for the long term. “Marketing is always a revenue generator, not a cost center,” he argued. Advertising works best when it both captures demand and shapes perceptions.

Measurement under strain

Yet even as brand and performance converge, measurement is becoming more difficult. Borkowski cautioned that click-through rates and attribution dashboards rarely tell the full story. Privacy changes, platform automation, and signal loss make it harder to isolate true performance.

Incrementality testing and multi-model approaches are now essential. Marketers must ask not just who clicked, but whether media genuinely drove outcomes that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Revis added that brands should not lose sight of storytelling. Data may tell you what is happening, but it is the story that shapes what people believe and belief drives loyalty as much as transactions.

Where AI helps and where humans are essential

AI inevitably threaded through the conversation. Webb pointed to its role at Uber in translation, personalization, and cutting long-form video into short-form snippets. Revis described how Magnolia uses AI for customer care, handling tickets in multiple languages seamlessly.

But panelists were careful about drawing boundaries. Revis insisted that idea generation still belongs to people. Watching a 19-year-old intern pitch 20 TikTok concepts, he argued, is more valuable and more fun than asking a model for prompts. AI can assist with scaling and iteration, but culture comes from lived human experience.

Borkowski agreed, noting that creative intelligence can optimize variations but cannot invent the kind of big idea that cuts through. AI, in their consensus, is an enabler: vital for speed and scale, but not a replacement for creativity.

Reinvention on the horizon

Looking ahead to 2026, the panelists reflected on what they hoped AI would unlock. Revis wished for a culture where automation stripped away busywork and let teams rediscover joy in their roles. Webb hoped AI could manage operational distractions, campaign pacing, budget updates, so marketers could focus on strategy. Borkowski admitted that after back-to-back platform launches, his wish was simply for more space to think strategically rather than react to daily pressures.

What united them was a vision of AI as infrastructure: taking on tasks that slow teams down, while human creativity remains the driver of relevance and connection.

Why this session mattered

The panel showed that advertising’s “new era” is not defined by tools alone. It is defined by how leaders adapt their organizations. Automation and AI can handle scale, translation, and iteration. But the work of interpreting culture, crafting stories, and building trust remains firmly human.

The most effective campaigns, they argued, will not choose between brand or performance, between creativity or accountability. They will deliver all of them at once with AI as an accelerator, and people as the storytellers.

SPONSORED BY