In this episode, Margherita Petrone, enterprise account director at Zappi, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss how marketing principles can inform personal change. They explore the gap between what we say matters and how we spend our time, the influence of defaults and social norms, and the value of making a desired behavior easier to repeat. They also look at the habits we carry home from work, including planning, and how to recognize when a useful routine has stopped serving its purpose.

For decades, marketers have measured everything around the ad while creative itself remained largely a matter of judgment. Alex Collmer, founder and executive chairman of Vidmob, explains how creative data is changing that - revealing not just which ads work, but why, and what marketers risk when AI starts making more of the decisions.

A show to stream, where to find it, a news headline, and a fllm worth seeing in the theater. MaryLeigh Bliss, YPulse’s chief content officer, explains how young consumers make those choices, and where their skepticism fits in.

What happens when AI stops being a technology project and starts being a business strategy?

Anna Convery, CMO of Verint, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to talk about the gap between adopting AI and proving its value. They discuss why AI pilots stall, which metrics matter, how AI can strengthen human judgment, and why customer interactions may be one of the richest sources of market intelligence available to marketers.

Koen Pauwels, professor of marketing at Northeastern University and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, joins Up Next to discuss three decades of research on word of mouth. He traces findings from a 2009 study on referral value through new 2026 research on word of mouth in the age of AI and influencer marketing, covering seeded word of mouth, online versus offline sentiment, and what makes online buzz cross into genuine cultural relevance.

AI's next frontier in advertising isn't generating content, it's understanding it. Dr. Cody Coleman, founder and CEO of Coactive AI, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain how multimodal AI can finally translate between how advertisers describe campaigns and how publishers organize their content libraries, and why benchmarks like MediaPerf are essential to get there responsibly.

Young consumers may prefer shopping in stores, but they aren’t abandoning digital. MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss new research on how Gen Z, Gen Alpha and millennials move between physical and digital shopping, use AI to research purchases, adopt new ways to pay and manage their money.

Anku Rani, a doctoral researcher at MIT and MIT Tata Center fellow, discusses her research on measuring cultural accuracy in AI-generated video. Her culture score breaks cultural faithfulness into identity, behavior, and context, and testing across three leading video models found that visual polish and cultural accuracy moved in opposite directions. The conversation covers what that means for brands producing video content across multiple markets.

Josh Lundberg, assistant professor of marketing at North Carolina Central University, shares research he conducted with colleagues, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, showing that photos of a charity's process, not just its outcome, lead people to donate more. He and Gabriella discuss why this works and how charities can put it into practice.

Media ecologist and futurist Jack Myers joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain why judgment, not intelligence, is becoming the scarcest resource inside organizations. The conversation traces how AI is reshaping advertising, consulting, and hiring, and what leaders should do differently as a result.

Dan Coates, CEO and co-founder of YPulse, talks with Gabriella Mirabelli about the youth research firm's new MCP connector, which puts its Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and young millennial data directly inside Claude and other similar gen AI systems, queryable alongside a client's own internal data, and alongside the reports and dashboards it has always sold. Coates explains how YPulse atomized decades of survey responses down to the respondent level, and what that shift means for data provenance, consent, and how brands make decisions in real time.

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. Goodson 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 of Ivey Business School at Western University discusses research published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) showing that the grammatical voice of a customer complaint predicts escalation risk independent of content or tone. The study analyzed more than 160,000 complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and replicated the finding across five controlled experiments. Duclos and Gabriella Mirabelli also examine the implications for HR contexts, the threat AI writing assistants pose to the syntactic signal, and the proper steps for practitioners who want to apply the research.

Josh Lifrak, director of performance and coaching at Limitless Minds and former mental skills director for the Chicago Cubs, walks through the six-step framework in his book Win Today. The conversation covers how people assign meaning to events, why the shift from negative to positive requires a neutral middle step, and how organizations create velocity by replacing ambiguity with behavioral clarity.

Kaley Mullin, sociologist and co-founder of Cool Shiny Insights, introduces the discipline of semiotics and explains how it sharpens brand strategy beyond what conventional research surfaces. She walks through the cultural curve framework, the difference between social listening and cultural listening, and how brands can better time their moves into emerging cultural spaces.

MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss new research on tween gaming, including how deeply the identity of gamer has taken hold among 8- to 12-year-olds. The conversation covers gaming as a family activity, a virtual economy, and one of the last shared cultural spaces not shaped by an algorithm.

Thomas Bunn, Global Chief Client Impact Officer at Zeno Group, walks through Clarity 2030, a 10-country study of more than 1,400 communications professionals. The research documents a widening gap between the influence communications teams are expected to carry and the investment, tool access, and organizational authority they have. The conversation also covers earned media's rising weight in LLM-driven discovery and why the traditional marketing-communications model no longer holds.

Ryan Webb of the Rotman School of Management joins the show to examine what decades of economics-based loyalty models get wrong about consumer behavior. His research draws on neuroscience and psychology to redefine habit as an automated context-response association, with direct implications for how marketers interpret repeat purchase data, design loyalty programs, and think about the risks of product changes.

AdGood Foundation is a 501(c)(3) that accepts donated CTV inventory from publishers and makes it available to nonprofits at $5 to $6 CPM, approximately 70% below standard market rates. Founder and CEO Kris Johns explains the structural economics behind persistent fill rate gaps, why publishers choose to donate inventory, and how a self-serve AI tool lets small nonprofits produce broadcast-ready spots for as little as $250. The conversation covers attribution realities, pairing CTV with social for donor acquisition, and AdGood's Nonprofit Media Fund, launched October 2025.

In today’s episode, MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer at YPulse, presents findings from the Post-Social Playbook report, a survey of 1,500 13 to 39-year-olds examining how algorithm-driven platforms have changed what social media is for. The conversation covers why follower counts no longer guarantee reach, what content formats are gaining traction with young consumers, how each major platform is being used, and where brands should focus when resources are limited.