The New Marketing Advantage: Speed With Judgment

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(Adweek House speakers during Advertising Week 2026 in NYC included Amanda Hirsch, Founder, creator, and host of Not Skinny But Not Fat, Steve, Founder, Chair and Chief Innovation Officer of Zappi, and Robert "Gronk" Gronkowski 4x Super Bowl Champion, Sports Broadcaster, and Entrepreneur)

Advertising Week in New York is a good metaphor for marketing right now: fast, crowded, fragmented and full of possibility.

After a day at ADWEEK House, one idea connected many of the conversations I heard:

Move faster. But know what you stand for.

During “The Chaos Advantage,” the discussion focused on how brands operate when culture moves faster than traditional approval processes. My takeaway was that perfection can easily become the enemy of progress. But speed alone isn’t the answer.

As the conversation turned to the disappearance of a true monoculture and the days of shared reference points in music for example. For example, with this year's VMAs, one can't help but think back to the early 2000s dominance of acts like Britney Spears and other.

Another question emerged as a result of the mutitude of subcutlures: does your brand actually have permission to participate?

Communities know when a brand understands them, and they know when it is simply trying to infiltrate a moment. That same tension surfaced in the AI conversation.

We are quickly moving beyond AI as a productivity tool toward advertising, predictive recommendations, multimodal experiences and assistants designed to help manage more of our lives.

One phrase stayed with me: “from search to help me run my life.” That is a massive opportunity, but it also raises bigger questions around privacy, disclosure, brand safety and trust. Frankly, it's one that questions its very premise as if the mundane in life were not worth experiencing for oneself....but that's another blog post for another day.

Another hypothetical involved asking AI, “Based on what you know about my kids, what should I get for them?”

For me, that is where possibility immediately collides with responsibility. I use AI in my own work and believe marketers need to understand and adopt these tools. But adoption without guardrails isn’t innovation. As capabilities expand, we need clearer guidelines around what data should be used, how advertising is disclosed and where personalization becomes intrusion.

The Zappi conversation added another layer. One statistic stood out: 7 in 10 ads don’t hold attention for more than three seconds. But attention isn’t the same as effectiveness.

As one speaker put it, “Few consumers dislike your ad. The problem is indifference.”

That feels especially relevant in an environment where brands can produce more content than ever. AI, creators, synthetic research and cultural moments may help us move faster, but they do not eliminate the need for judgment.

The simplest line I heard all day may also have been the best: “Fall in love with your customer and the life they live.”

That is the work:

• Know the customer

• Know what makes the brand distinctive

• Know where you have credibility

• Establish the guardrails

• Then give teams enough freedom to move

Because moving at the speed of culture does not mean doing everything. It means knowing what matters enough to act on.