LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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Requiem for the Soulful Brand
Pope Leo XIV (who hails from the same town where we’ll be hosting our next Marketecture Live – coincidence?) weighed in on what AI means for the world. But he neglected to say what his latest encyclical letter means for marketers, so we’ll translate from the Latin, or perhaps adapt a few things from his English version.
While a papal document doesn't usually make the cut for a marketing tech newsletter, this one should. It is a rebuke of the tech infrastructures, algorithms, and data dynamics we build our campaigns on every single day.
Instead of going through all of Magnifica Humanitas, which is just about 5,000 words shorter than The Great Gatsby (they address overlapping themes of unchecked materialism in the 2020s and 1920s, respectively), here are four key themes that the Pope wants us to pay attention to:
The Death of ‘Growth at All Costs’: The text takes a swing at the "technocratic paradigm” of letting the cold logic of efficiency shape every human interface. Marketers may feel this with their own businesses too when the emphasis shifts so far to growth that the business forgets about purpose. And peak automation fatigue can alienate workers – and consumers – who are looking for any sense of humans’ spark in brands’ marketing and communications.
Data Colonialism Goes Mainstream: The letter warns that tech monopolies appropriate personal lives, scraping vital data to train predictive models and determine "who and what is deemed to matter." For marketers, the narrative is shifting from consumer privacy to data autonomy. Brands will build trust by explicitly respecting data boundaries rather than manipulating consumers.
The Battle for Authenticity: The manifesto notes that AI acts as an amplifier for distorting public narratives, muddying the boundaries between fact and fiction. When media channels are flooded with low-grade synthetic content, authenticity is your only real moat. Prioritizing verified insights and trusted sourcing is now a core brand safety strategy.
Perfection Is Boring: The letter warns against reducing the human person to a mere "project to be optimized." In human experience, a limitation or flaw is often the exact catalyst for creativity. Hyper-optimized AI outputs inherently average out toward the median. The unique nature of human storytelling is exactly what creates emotional resonance.
It’s strange in a way, or in many ways. The U.S. courts have increasingly treated corporations like people, when it suits corporations’ interests. And brands are most definitely not people. They’re constructs, at best. What is Nike’s brand? The name? The swoosh? The feeling it evokes? Well, all of it, including many intangibles that can’t be quantified beyond a share price or the proverbial “what one pays for it over the price of a generic alternative.”
It’s hard to imagine Pope Leo blessing the idea that brands have a soul. And yet one could see brands existing on a scale of soullessness to soulfulness, or perhaps heartlessness to heartfulness. The lifeblood of it all is the people behind the brand.
The Pope is reminding us that people are at the heart of everything we do. And maybe there’s an alternative to the WALL-E dystopia. Just maybe there’s a future for the soulful, heartful brands whose people wield technology, rather than the other way around.
— David Berkowitz, Chief Community Officer, Marketecture Media
1
Global Brands Build In-House AI Ad Factories
Who: CMOs, Agency Leaders, Retail Marketers, Consumer Goods, Martech Teams
What: Kimberly-Clark, Target, and Catalyst Brands are using AI teams in India to create ads, localize campaigns, generate product visuals, and speed up influencer selection. One company reportedly cut content production timelines from nearly a month to just two hours.
Why it matters: The “agency vs. in-house” debate just got more serious. AI is making it easier for brands to internalize creative production while keeping strategy external.
(Reuters)
2
Google’s AI Search Changes Force Marketers to Rethink Visibility
Who: SEO Teams, Performance Marketers, Publishers, E-commerce Brands, Agencies
What: Google’s latest AI-powered search updates are pushing marketers toward a world where AI agents handle shopping, bookings, and recommendations before users ever visit a brand’s site. Marketers are increasingly focused on whether their content is AI-discoverable, not just SEO-friendly.
Why it matters: Traffic strategy is shifting from clicks to inclusion. Brands now need content that AI systems can summarize, trust, and surface.
3
Marketers Trust AI to Buy Media, Not Build Brands
Who: Media Buyers, Brand Marketers, Agency Leaders, Programmatic Directors
What: At the recent Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, brand and agency executives revealed they are comfortably handing over tactical media tasks like programmatic bidding and creative iteration management to AI agents. However, a major trust gap remains when it comes to core brand elements. Brands like Ally Bank and Mondelez's LUNA Bar are keeping strict human oversight on brand voice, ethos, and strategic ideation, relegating AI strictly to back-end optimization and brainstorming.
Why it matters: Marketers are drawing a clear line between operational efficiency and brand soul; use AI agents to automate the tedious math of media buying, but keep humans firmly in control of the creative narrative.
(Digiday)
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