Super Unfiltered

John Elder, Mike Barrett, Bob Winter, Elana King
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  • MARKETING
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

At the fast-moving crossroads of AI and brand marketing, everyone's asking: What's actually working? What's hype? What's next? Super Unfiltered is our way to: Cut through the noise with honest, practical talk. Spotlight real wins (and honest missteps) from leaders in the field. Share playbooks that help the industry navigate what's coming.

Episodes

  1. 12/16/2025

    Impact of AI for In-House Brand Creatives: James Murphy

    When compliance becomes a creativity bottleneck, what gets built? James Murphy just revealed what happens when you bring AI into the most risk-averse industry on earth: banking. Here's what the SVP Creative Brand Lead at U.S. Bank shared in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The trust paradox: Finance lives and dies on authenticity, but AI-generated content exists in a legal gray zone. When Midjourney spits out artwork, who owns it? Who clears it? And how do you make sure a prompt doesn't accidentally infringe on Disney, or worse, erode customer trust? → The junior creative survival question: Art directors used to spend year one comping storyboards. Now AI can rough-cut video on demand. So what do their first five years look like when the grunt work disappears? → 80% of U.S. banks hiked AI spend in 2025: Some by 25% or more. But they're not just betting on content generation, they're navigating the tightrope between personalization at scale and regulatory compliance that can kill a campaign in seconds. The uncomfortable truth? When everyone can produce at the same speed, regulated industries like banking face a choice: embrace the sameness or build guardrails that actually protect what makes them different. So here's Supergood's question: When AI removes the friction from execution, does compliance become your new competitive advantage, or your creative death sentence?

    19 min

  2. 12/02/2025

    Copyright in the AI Era: Joe Naylor

    When copyright becomes unenforceable, who pays for creativity? Joe Naylor just dropped some uncomfortable truths about the billion-dollar battle between AI companies and the creators they're scraping from. Here's what the CEO of ImageRights revealed in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The $6.3M wake-up call: One photographer included a single sentence in his contract—"non-transferable and non-assignable"—and turned it into the largest jury statutory damage award in US history. That's $150,000 per photo. → Big Tech's selective spending: AI companies will drop billions on NVIDIA chips and data centers, but ask them to pay for the actual content training their models? Suddenly it's a "national security threat" and we'll "lose to China." → Stock photography is dead: If you're shooting generic office scenes for licensing, AI already replaced you. But if you're shooting Taylor Swift? You're irreplaceable. The gap between commodity and craft just became a chasm. The uncomfortable truth? Courts are calling AI training "exceedingly transformative"—but conveniently ignoring that the outputs directly compete with the creators whose work trained the models. Half a billion images hit the internet every day. Getty ingests tens of thousands before lunch. And the question isn't whether AI scraped your work—it's whether you registered it with the copyright office before they did. So here's Supergood's question: If AI can generate anything you can create, what makes your work worth protecting, and worth paying for?

    35 min

  3. 11/25/2025

    AI vs. Humans in Production: Matthew Craig

    A former Wall Street Journal photojournalist just explained why your production budget is about to become irrelevant. Matthew Craig built a global visual storytelling network for brands like Airbnb and Google. Now he's running AI workflows in parallel with live shoots—and the "impossible" shots are getting cheaper than stock footage. His prediction? The entire industry is asking the wrong question. Here's what he shared in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The parallel pipeline: While his team films real people, AI models train on the exact same brand guidelines. By post-production, they're synthesizing product shots that would've cost $50K and taken weeks. Clients can't tell the difference. → The microwave vs. the kitchen: Most creatives use AI like a microwave—type prompt, get random output. Matt's team uses Stable Diffusion like a full professional kitchen, controlling lighting, motion, climate, and environment with the precision of a DP. The gap between these approaches is the gap between amateurs and agencies in 12 months. → The homogenization trap: Every Midjourney output looks the same because it's trained on the statistical average of the internet. The agencies that survive will be the ones capturing their own training data during live shoots—building proprietary visual languages that can't be replicated. The uncomfortable truth? Stock footage research used to take hours. Now generative synthesis is faster AND cheaper. The only question is whether you're still paying for the old way. His boldest prediction for 2026: Audio. Voice becomes the primary human-computer interface, and musicians start building hyper-curated AI models. The music industry's copyright battle will make visual AI look like a warmup. So here's Supergood's question: Are you training AI on your brand's visual language, or are you still licensing someone else's generic footage?

    35 min

  4. 11/18/2025

    Young Lion's Perspective on the Future of AI x Advertising: Ronaldo Cordova

    A D&AD Yellow Pencil winner just admitted something most creatives won't say out loud. Ronaldo Cordova, who went from Ecuador to winning one of advertising's most prestigious awards, uses AI on every brief. Even when clients explicitly say "don't use AI." His logic? They're buying the work, not the process. Here's what he revealed in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The invisible revolution: While agencies debate AI ethics, Ronaldo uses ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Runway on client work—and clients never notice. They just see award-winning results delivered faster. → The beer refill campaign: His breakthrough idea came from a morning journal entry, refined with ChatGPT, and produced using AI tools. Traditional approach? Weeks of production. His approach? Days. Same Yellow Pencil outcome. → The 1-2 year warning: Tools that turn a single image into commercial-grade video already exist. In two years, anyone can recreate Will Smith eating spaghetti at broadcast quality. The creative who can't adapt will be the one holding the old Bose headphones. The uncomfortable truth? The industry's AI debate is already over. The winners just stopped asking for permission. His prediction for 2026: Agencies shift from billing hours to billing outcomes. If AI lets you finish in 3 hours what used to take 30, should you get paid less—or more? So here's Supergood's question: Are you still pretending AI isn't in your workflow, or are you building your advantage while others debate?

    19 min

  5. 11/12/2025

    Rebuilding the Creative Process with Generative AI: Milton and Jones

    When execution becomes free, what are you really selling? Milton Correa and Jones Krahl just revealed something uncomfortable: the ad industry's sacred "1% idea, 99% execution" rule died.  AI killed it. Here's what they shared in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The vinyl-doll paradox: A trend went viral not because of production quality (AI made that accessible to everyone), but because the concept was novel. When everyone has the same tools, the idea is all that's left. → Personalization at scale is table stakes: Their clients aren't asking if they can create thousands of personalized ads. They're asking what comes after they can do that effortlessly. → Taste is the new competitive advantage: Rick Rubin gets paid millions for his taste, not his technical skills. In an AI-rich world where a graduate student can build a website in 30 seconds, your ability to discern what's worth making matters more than your ability to make it. The uncomfortable truth? If AI can execute your idea as well as you can, you weren't really a creator, you were a production assistant. The non-negotiable skill now isn't what you know today. It's how fast you're willing to learn while everything changes. So here's Supergood question: If everyone can execute at the same level, what makes your creative work irreplaceable?

    28 min

  6. 10/30/2025

    Electrifying Cadillac, Transforming Brand Marketing: Melissa Grady Dias

    Former Cadillac CMO and Forbes 50 Most Influential CMO Melissa Grady-Dias joins Super Unfiltered to share how she turned pools into insights, why human judgment beats artificial intelligence, and what marketers need to stop doing right now. What you'll learn: Why the future belongs to individuals who master workflows, not just disciplines How AI gives everyone a "chief of staff" at their fingertips Why human intervention remains non-negotiable as platforms auto-optimize Her unconventional AI use cases, from instant presentations to ChatGPT as a brainstorm partner "Don't let fear stand in the way of trying something. Once you start getting into it...baby steps can happen in a day."

    32 min

  7. 10/16/2025

    Leading Teams from AI Curious to AI Capable: Taryn Crouthers

    Most leaders know they should be adopting AI. But knowing and doing are very different things, especially when your team is skeptical, overwhelmed, or waiting for someone else to go first. Taryn Crouthers didn't wait. As a former leader at ATTN:, she co-hosted the Women in AI Summit and helped launch a cohort specifically for women in media and marketing who felt left out of the AI conversation. Not because she was a technical expert. Because she asked: "Why not me?" In this episode, we sit down with Taryn Crouthers—CEO of SPCSHP, formerly President of ATTN:, and co-host of the Women in AI Summit—to talk about what it actually takes to integrate AI across a creative agency. Her team mapped over 100 time-draining tasks to AI solutions, but the biggest blockers weren't technical. They were cultural. We dig into how different departments adopt AI at different speeds (and why that's smart), what it means to lead without a playbook, and how to bring your team along without becoming the AI police. If you're a marketing leader trying to bring your team along, not just push them forward, this one's for you. For more info on the second annual AI summit happening November 12th: https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/the-female-quotients-second-annual-ai-summit-set-for-november/

    29 min

  8. 10/16/2025

    From AI Experiments to Brand Growth: Carole Irgang

    Most CMOs have run an AI pilot by now. Maybe it generated some social copy. Maybe it helped with research. But when it comes to turning generative and agentic AI into actual brand growth? That's where the gap gets real. Carole Irgang, now a fractional CMO, has spent her career helping brands find growth in the space between strategy and execution. In this episode, she and Supergood's leadership dig into the hard question: How do you move AI from interesting experiment to measurable business impact? You'll hear how leading CMOs are thinking about the difference between generative AI (creating content) and agentic AI (making decisions), where the ROI actually shows up, and what it takes organizationally to make AI a growth driver rather than just a cost-saving tool. Carole breaks down the frameworks she's seeing work—and the expensive mistakes teams are making when they confuse automation with strategy. This isn't about using AI to do marketing faster. It's about using AI to do marketing that actually matters. If you're a CMO trying to connect AI capability to business outcomes, this conversation is your starting point.

    37 min

  9. 10/16/2025

    Why We're Here (And Why Now): Intro to Super Unfiltered

    AI isn't coming to marketing, it's already here. But if you're a CMO trying to separate signal from noise, good luck. Every vendor promises transformation. Every conference has an AI track. And yet most marketing leaders are still figuring out what actually moves the needle. That's why we're launching Super Unfiltered. In this intro episode, Supergood's leadership lays out the mission: have the honest conversations the industry needs but isn't having. Not another hype cycle podcast. Not a victory lap tour. Real talk with CMOs who are in the trenches: testing, failing, learning, and building the practical application playbooks that'll define what marketing becomes next. We're exploring what's actually working, what's expensive theater, and how the smartest leaders are navigating a moment where the rules are being rewritten in real time. Because the gap between AI's promise and marketing's reality? That's where the interesting work happens.  If you're a marketing leader tired of thought leadership that stops at thoughts, you're in the right place. _*]:min-w-0"> We're Supergood, an AI-native creative agency built for brands ready to move differently. Powered by our proprietary platform and enterprise grade data stack, we deliver work that's 2x faster and 2x more effective than traditional agencies. This is Super Unfiltered. Let's get into it.

    22 min
  • 9 Episodes

About

At the fast-moving crossroads of AI and brand marketing, everyone's asking: What's actually working? What's hype? What's next? Super Unfiltered is our way to: Cut through the noise with honest, practical talk. Spotlight real wins (and honest missteps) from leaders in the field. Share playbooks that help the industry navigate what's coming.

Information

  • Creator
    John Elder, Mike Barrett, Bob Winter, Elana King
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    Super Unfiltered