Inspiring Futures · 2026-04-30 · 55 min
AI and The Marketing Department For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag , Andy Bateman , and Sarah Lent / Mixtape is a management consultancy designed specifically for marketers navigating the AI era. Between them, they've spent careers inside the big agency networks (Omnicom, WPP, IPG, Interbrand, R/GA), led innovation and customer strategy at Deloitte, and sat on the client side as senior marketers and CMOs. They've been the consultants, they've been the clients, and they've run the agencies. They started Mixtape because they kept noticing the same thing: most strategy work gets shelved, and the work that actually matters is the work that gets adopted. In the past year, they spent some time researching what was happening with AI and marketing departments. They spent an hour each with thirty CMOs working across twelve industries. Their main conclusion is the one nobody wants to say out loud: nobody has figured this out yet. Not the consultancies. Not the holdcos. Not the platforms. What they did find is a set of moves leading marketers are quietly making while everyone else is still arguing about prompts.
Mike Lane- CEO and Founder- Fluency76 / 100Neil Barrie- Global CEO and Co-Founder- 21st Century Brand82 / 100Kaye Symington- Head of Marketing- Newspaper Club72 / 100James Nord- Founder Fohr64 / 100Ammunition- Kelly Heilpern Chief Strategy Officer and Chris Shadrick Director of Strategy