On the latest episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, top leaders from NBCUniversal, IBM, State Farm, Autodesk and Coinbase talk shop and compare notes on marketing, tech and consumer trends in conversations with Todd Spangler, Variety business editor. The conversations were recorded June 22-25 in the Canva Creative Cabana space at the Cannes Lions international festival of creativity.
Dara Treseder, CMO of Autodesk, and Cat Ferdon, CMO of Coinbase, compare notes on how they reach audiences and how they’ve harnessed the power of AI at their next-generation digital giants.
Treseder cited research indicating that an overwhelming (82%) number of people “are comfortable using AI in their general lives — maybe a little too comfortable, I don’t think we need AI to be our therapist — but only a third feel comfortable using it in their field. Meanwhile, the increase jobs with AI as a prerequisite has more than doubled. So there’s a mismatch between job seekers and the jobs that are available. [Autodesk] just announced a $350 million commitment that is focused on preparing the next generation and job seekers for jobs in this AI era across design and ‘make’ — whether it’s architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, or media and entertainment.”
Ferdon detailed how the crypto currency exchange became one of the biggest brands in the emerging world of nontraditional finance and banking options. AI has been baked into Coinbase from the start, she noted.
“Coinbase has been super agentic-forward and our CEO and founder [Brian Armstrong] has been very public about that. So we’ve been working into our workflows for well over the last year, and we’re using it to kind of optimize everything across marketing,” Ferdon says. “But we believe pretty strongly at Coinbase that AI can help you get to creative outcomes faster, but it’s not a replacement for human creativity.”
Jonathan Adashek, Senior VP of marketing and communications for IBM, offered perspective from one of Big Tech’s most enduring brands, which is increasingly focused on helping large organizations build the systems to help them make the most out of their AI investments. For Big Blue, it started by embracing AI in their own workflows in a serious way. It’s been transformative, Adashek says.
“Our creatives were spending 80% of their time working on derivative assets. So they’re not really getting to be creatives. They’re doing grunt work. Yes. And that’s not what they they’re passionate about,” Adashek says. “We’ve been able to take that number down to about 40% and dropping. We did something with the Sphere in Las Vegas and we turned it into a giant fishbowl and using AI to help us with the creative design and concepting. We thought it would take us about 15-16 days to do that. It took us two days, and the creatives who were involved actually said they got more ideas out of it because it gave them new things to think about. As an organization inside of IBM, we’ve used AI and automation and corresponding process improvement to take $4.5 billion out of our annual spend in the last three years, and we’re going to take another $1 billion out this year.”
Mark Marshall, chairman of advertising partnership for NBCUniversal, and Kristyn Cooke, chief agency sales marketing officer for State Farm, have done a lot of business together over the years and it shows in their conversation. Cooke explains why an event like NBCU’s BravoCon fan gathering is the kind of cultural event that where State Farm needs to have a presence to reach the next generation of consumers.
“It’s about connecting around shared interests and relationships and your passion points. And that’s what BravoCon brings to us,” Cooke says. “It’s a very powerful thing because the audience is actually the story. They just are, and they’re super engaged. And we’ve learned a lot because early on when we worked with BravoCon, it was creating branded spaces, and then we evolved to creating these like memorable experiences. We created a way for fans to interact and to feel something in that moment. BravoCon has been really good for us overall.”
With the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles just two years away, Marshall spoke about NBCU’s plans to elevate its coverage even beyond the heights achieved in in the Paris 2024 Summer Games with a hometown event.
“The last U.S. Summer Olympics was Atlanta [in 1996]. In that year, NBC aired 186 hours of programming. We will be close to 8,000 hours of programming in ’28,” Marshall explains. “The difference is, now fans can curate their own Olympic experience. You can watch live any sport you would like on Peacock, or you can have Mike Tirico’s soothing voice talk to you at night and tell you about the day and what happened and the background stories of what it is. What we’ve started to learn is that fans love watching the sports, but what they really love is the storytelling of how [the athletes and teams] got to that. Those are the stories we’re telling now. And at NBC, across NBA, MLB and NFL, we’re infusing that same strategy across everything.”