The AI Advertising Podcast: S2
Episode 1
AI, Creativity, Authenticity & The Human Edge
About This Episode
As AI floods the marketing world with faster content, scalable workflows, and voice clones that sound eerily human—one big question remains:
Can AI create work that actually feels human?
In this episode, we dive deep into that question with two guests on the front lines of AI-powered content:
Lee Odden | CEO of TopRank Marketing
Shaun Benoliel | Creative Straegy Lead, StackAdapt
Transcript
Diego Pineda (00:00:00)
We’re in the golden age of AI adoption. The market’s worth nearly $50 billion. 88% of marketers are using AI daily. And yes, AI can make things faster, more scalable, and often, more efficient.
But there’s a different question emerging: can AI make content that feels?
Because in our rush to scale, we risk losing what makes creative work…well, work. Voice. Emotion. Relevance. Soul.
Today, we’re exploring that tension with two guests:
Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, a B2B strategist who’s spent two decades building content systems rooted in thought leadership. And Shaun Benoliel, Creative Strategy Lead at StackAdapt, who helps brands push creative ideas forward using AI tools daily.
Let’s jump in.
Podcast Intro (00:00:57)
Welcome to the AI Advertising Podcast, brought to you by StackAdapt. I’m your host, Diego Pineda. Get ready to dive into AI, Ads, and Aha moments.
Diego Pineda (00:01:13)
Let’s start with a foundational truth: AI is not a magic wand. It’s a mirror. Whatever you bring to it—your clarity, your tone, your strategy—gets reflected back at scale. So if your brand voice is dialed in, AI can help you scale it. If not? You’re just scaling noise.
Here’s Lee Odden.
Lee Odden (00:01:35)
I think one of the important takeaways or observations I’ve had about the advent of AI as it relates to marketing is that it just makes you more of what you are, at least right now, the way the platforms are. What I mean by that is, you know, there’s this hopefulness that exists with people who aren’t maybe necessarily as skilled as they’d like to be in marketing, and they can feel like they can use AI tools to level up. But really, you know it’s the people that are most imaginative, the most creative, the smartest people who understand context and prompting that are going to get the most impact and output out of these AI systems. Because when you put mediocre in, you’re going to get mediocre out. You’re just going to get more of it. But when you bring brilliance in and insightfulness and thoughtfulness into an AI platform, into the workflows that you’re trying to automate and all those sorts of things, the outputs are commensurate with that quality of input.
Diego Pineda (00:02:33)
AI makes it easier than ever to ship 10 versions of a campaign in the time it used to take to make one. Shaun thinks that just because we can move faster, doesn’t mean we’re moving with more intention.
Shaun Benoliel (00:02:47)
It’s so funny, we’re in this weird place right now where brands and agencies can make more than ever before. But I’m finding that, that doesn’t always mean that more is better. There’s this weird tension between output and intention. And I think the best brands and the best creatives are thinking with a storytelling mindset. And when speed becomes the metric, you kind of lose that storytelling aspect.
While AI can really crank out those headlines in seconds and optimize what those headlines are saying, I think it’s really important for strategists, for creatives, for agencies to pause and ask, you know, why does this matter? What’s the why behind this? The challenge really is like keeping the heart in the work while everything around you is pushing for faster turnaround.
Diego Pineda (00:03:38)
AI should not replace your instincts, but respond to them instead. And that’s where creativity becomes the real differentiator.
Shaun Benoliel (00:03:51)
When we think about all these LLMs being trained on so much of the same stuff. We hear the word AI slop so much. And I think that how you train your AI is super important and being able to help it find your tone, your language, you know, training it on previous campaigns. So then you are able to have it, you know, speak in the right way and obviously mimic your style, but still having that human in the loop to gut check everything. You know, AI, like I said, can mimic your style, but it can’t read a room. doesn’t get subtext, humor, or like cultural nuance. So being able to tune it and have it reflect your brand’s soul, but keeping that human element to push it further and make sure that there’s… you’re not just putting out the same kind of AI slop.
Diego Pineda (00:04:42)
So what stands out now? The stuff that doesn’t feel auto-generated. Lee Odden has developed a framework to train AI assistants and help his team create quality content consistently.
Lee Odden (00:04:56)
So we developed this best answer marketing system. It’s based on six pillars and it’s a full funnel solution or paradigm or system as it were. When you have a system like that articulated and well-documented and you have that available to team members you know who are still getting up to speed, it’s pretty amazing. It’s like having a person that is always on tap to answer questions about what they’re working on now. How does that reconcile with the system? You know, according to BAM, you know, how might I deal with this SEO/GEO thing? Or if I’m working with public relations and media relations, how does that fuel into the trust engine of BAM? And what are the experiential content opportunities? And you can ask questions and get really useful information very, very quickly. And the magic there is the context.
Diego Pineda (00:05:56)
Here’s where things get interesting—because it’s not all risk. Used well, AI can be a creative force multiplier. The key is knowing where to bring it in, and where to leave space for human taste.
For example, Shaun has seen success using an AI voiceover for podcast ads.
Shaun Benoliel (00:06:15)
There’s definitely one campaign I worked on and, the voice was indistinguishable from a human, even though we used an AI voice and the way it was able to land with nuance, you know, tonality and warmth was a really strong identifier of like, wow, okay, we can really bridge the gap between human-created, but reducing the lift with AI, not having to go to a platform, hire a voice talent, re-record. The opportunity to just tweak the platform and be able to change the tone and subtle tics in the voice nuance was able to to really optimize it to make it sound superhuman.So the client was thrilled with that. As these voice clones and AI voice platforms become stronger and trained more on human voices, it’s just we’re going to just see more of that. And it’s going to be hard to distinguish from what on the radio or what on the TV, the voiceover spot is AI or human sounding.
Diego Pineda (00:07:22)
We’ve talked about how AI affects creativity and content—but how do you actually integrate AI into your workflow without losing control or consistency?
Lee Odden offered a great window into what that looks like inside TopRank Marketing.
Lee Odden (00:07:36)
I initiated an AI adoption sort of program with our agency earlier this year. And, you know, we have been encouraging our team members to experiment, of course, while simultaneously providing a little bit of structure and direction. And so, you know, people are like icebergs in a way, meaning that a lot of times when they’re at work, you know, they’re using 10% of their capability and there’s so much under the water.
And what by allowing experimentation, it really taps into that under-the-water, the rest of the iceberg capability of a person because there they can go ahead on their own terms and at their own pace, start to understand how to solve problems using technology.
So on the creative side, obviously, you know, there are fun things like Firefly and Adobe, because we use Adobe products. And so being able to input specifications, color hex codes and brand guidelines and all that sort of thing and being able to put that in as context and then be able to create derivative assets very quickly, permutations of one thing very, very quickly, which might have otherwise taken many, many hours.
Diego Pineda (00:08:49)
That metaphor is powerful. AI isn’t just about tools, but about unlocking more of what your team already knows how to do.
Lee Odden (00:08:59)
Anytime there’s a workflow that’s already identified, you know that’s an opportunity for automation or at least AI assistance. So, everything from, you know, doing research, to you know creating ah custom GPTs or GPT folders, for example, in the case of GPT or projects, in the case of Claude, and being able to upload context information about a particular initiative, let’s say a tone of voice, examples of writing, objectives and persona, and then being able to gut check ideas against that from time to time. You know, kind of like having a peer that you can gut check when you’re ideating something. Obviously, data analysis is a huge, huge opportunity. Using MCP to connect HubSpot or other CRM to ChatGPT or Claude, allowing you to ask conversationally questions about what you know, what segments are yielding the greatest revenue or what you know what’s happening here, what’s happening there in a conversational way.
Diego Pineda (00:10:02)
But how do you decide which tasks to delegate to AI and which tasks to be human led?
Lee Odden (00:10:09)
In our case, it’s always human-led. There’s no fully automated thing per se. And if there’s something that is over 50% automated, then there are checks, you know, because like hitting a golf ball a little bit off, it’s, you know, 300 yards or meters down the road, faraway, it’s way, way off course. And that can happen, especially with hallucinations and other issues. So ,it’s always human led in our case. That’s a good full philosophical sort of or question to ask about how AI is implemented strategically in an organization. Are we creating agents to automate entire tasks?
In our case, we’re not doing that quite yet. But what we are doing is identifying those elements within a process that make sense to add a level of automation or AI integration as it were. You know, so a simple example would be creative. If there is one version of a thing that’s made and you know we’re going to deliver five or six versions to a client, we can quickly create those derivatives you know using an automation feature within Firefly, for example, or Firefly powered automation element within Photoshop or whatever, InDesign or whatever tools being used, right, for example. And so making the decision is… driven by opportunity, you know where does it make sense? Where’s there a pain point that could be solved for efficiency or effectiveness by adding an AI capability? That’s probably the first thing.
And then obviously we look at other dimensions too, like where can we innovate in ways that, more quickly, you know, so you have one human brain, but plugged in to their own capability to create prompts and engage with an AI platform, they can create many, many, many variations of a creative idea or campaign structure or whatever, versus just doing it on their own. And it’s too important to let the machine decide by itself, at least at this point.
Diego Pineda (00:12:13)
This hybrid approach—automation for speed, human for strategy—is what separates experimental dabbling from strategic orchestration.
And for agencies wondering how to begin: start where Lee did. Identify pain points. Look for repeatable workflows. Encourage structured play. Then scale what works.
Diego Pineda (00:12:38)
So what will separate the winners from the copycats in the AI era? Not the tools. Everyone has access to those. It’s how you use them. The taste you bring. The questions you ask. And the story you’re trying to tell.
Shaun Benoliel (00:12:53)
While we go towards this, like this hybrid world, AI is running the operations, humans need to shape the meaning. You know, right now everybody really has access to the same tools. And what’s going to separate those brands and those marketers that are leading is taste and storytelling. Efficiency, I think soon is going to stop being a brag. It’s just going to be expected. And the real differentiator is going to be things like creative judgment, like emotional intelligence, and then storytelling, obviously.
Diego Pineda (00:13:21)
For marketing agencies, the AI landscape is forcing them to evolve and rethink their business models.
Lee Odden (00:13:29)
Seeing the real or perceived commoditization of content creation, because of technology broadly, not just AI, certainly warrants a shift for agencies and understanding how can they best create value for their clients. And so in our case, it is more of a focus on, in some cases, strategy. Like, you know, there’s a very large social network, we’ll say, that we provide SEO strategy for and have for many, many years. And, you know, we’re not implementing SEO for that company, we’re providing strategy and it’s data informed strategy, right? And it does touch content, but it’s informative of content. It’s not execution of content in that case. And I think that’s a direction where a lot of agencies that want to create value in this world work. Content, again, real and perceived, commoditization of content is resulting in things being brought in house or changed where an outside resource isn’t used in the same way. I think it’s really important, you know, overall for any agency or consultant to always be gut checking, how are they best providing value to their clients. Otherwise, what’s the point? You know, you’re shortening your lifespan if you’re not doing that. So, strategically, creatively, you know, ability to use data, you know ability to help optimize from a workflow perspective and help that company scale, help them hit those numbers, help them hit those outcomes, not just outputs. Agency game isn’t an output game in the future. It’s an outcome game.
Diego Pineda (00:15:09)
It comes back to something simple: don’t just ask what can AI do. Ask: why does it matter? And is it still saying something worth hearing?
Diego Pineda (00:15:23)
Let’s wrap up with a few key takeaways:
If your strategy, brand voice, or creative clarity is weak—AI will only scale the noise. Start with intention.
AI makes you faster. But creativity that connects still takes time, thought, and emotional nuance.
Polish without personality is forgettable. Use AI as a tool, but let human taste be the filter.
Let AI assist, not replace. Voiceovers, scripts, ideation—AI can handle the heavy lifting. But the storytelling still needs you.
Finally, taste, not tools, is the differentiator. Everyone has access to the same AI. What sets you apart is your judgment, your strategy, your ability to move people.
Podcast Outro (00:16:13)
Thanks for listening to this episode of The AI Advertising Podcast. This podcast is produced by StackAdapt. Visit us at stackadpat.com for more information about using AI in your advertising campaigns. If you liked what you heard, remember to subscribe, and we’ll see you next time.
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