Ctrl Creative: How Smartly’s Laura Desmond is rewriting the CMO playbook with AI

Opening: The AI-Powered Evolution of Modern Marketing

The advertising industry stands at an inflection point. For decades, the chief marketing officer's mandate remained relatively static: generate volume, manage costs, and optimize within existing frameworks. But according to Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly, this playbook is obsolete.

In a compelling conversation on the latest episode of The Speed of Culture Podcast, Desmond sits down with Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy, the AI-powered consumer intelligence platform, to explore how artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the CMO's role—transforming marketing leaders from cost managers into growth architects.

Smartly, the world's leading AI-powered advertising platform, manages over $6 billion in annual ad spend for 700+ global brands. Processing 92 billion creative signals every day across platforms from Meta to Amazon, Smartly sits at the epicenter of AI's impact on advertising.

But as Desmond explains, the shift isn't about deploying more technology or producing more ads. Instead, it's about building intelligent creative—campaigns that adapt in real-time to consumer behavior, powered by AI systems that operate at the speed of culture itself.

The conversation between Britton and Desmond reveals a critical truth for CMOs navigating 2025 and beyond: success in the AI era requires a fundamental recalibration of how marketing organizations think about creativity, execution, and growth. It's no longer sufficient to optimize within silos.

The most forward-thinking marketing leaders are those who understand how to harness AI not to automate away human creativity, but to amplify it. They're moving beyond departmental efficiency metrics to become strategic partners in corporate growth. This shift represents more than a tactical adjustment—it's a seismic change in how marketing drives business value.

Desmond's insights in this episode, coupled with research from leading industry analysts, paint a compelling picture of what the next generation of CMOs must become. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape marketing. The question is whether today's marketing leaders are prepared to embrace this transformation.

The CMO Evolution: From Cost Manager to Growth Driver

The traditional CMO role has been trapped in a paradox. Despite marketing's undeniable impact on revenue, CMOs have increasingly been positioned as cost centers—tasked with doing more with less, optimizing existing campaigns, and managing budgets. This mindset has calcified into organizational DNA across industries.

But recent research suggests this model is fundamentally broken. According to a BCG study cited by Desmond, marketing is poised to become the most transformative function in the enterprise—a dramatic shift from its historical positioning.

Yet many organizations haven't updated their expectations of what CMOs should deliver or how they should be measured. CMOs must transition from efficiency-focused leaders into growth catalysts who can articulate exactly how marketing investments drive bottom-line revenue.

The AI era accelerates this transition. As Desmond explains:

“CMOs must move beyond efficiency to growth.”

With AI handling routine optimization tasks—bid management, budget allocation, audience targeting—CMOs have an unprecedented opportunity to focus on strategic questions. What markets should we enter? How should we position ourselves? What customer insights should drive our creative direction?

These questions require human judgment, strategic vision, and an understanding of customer psychology that no algorithm can replicate.

This evolution requires a fundamental mindset shift. Traditional CMOs succeeded by optimizing existing frameworks within their control. The next generation of CMOs must become systems thinkers, capable of orchestrating complex workflows across technology platforms, creative teams, and data systems.

They must understand how to work alongside AI, steering its capabilities toward business objectives while maintaining the human touch that builds authentic customer relationships.

The stakes are significant. Gartner research indicates that 65% of CMOs acknowledge AI will dramatically change their role within the next two years. Yet only 21% of marketing leaders believe they have the talent and capability needed to achieve their goals.

This gap—between acknowledgment of change and readiness for it—represents both a challenge and an opportunity. CMOs who invest in understanding AI's capabilities today will emerge as the strategic leaders of tomorrow.

Intelligent Creative: AI-Powered Campaigns That Adapt in Real-Time

The concept of “intelligent creative” sits at the heart of Desmond's vision for the future of advertising. Unlike traditional campaign creation, where a marketer produces a fixed set of assets and hopes they resonate with target audiences, intelligent creative uses AI to build always-on campaigns that adapt to consumer signals in real-time.

Consider a practical example: A beverage brand launches a campaign during summer. Intelligent creative systems can dynamically adjust messaging, imagery, and even video formats based on real-time signals—weather conditions in specific geographies, trending cultural moments, competitive activity, and individual consumer behavior.

A cold drink ad emphasizes refreshment on a sweltering day in Phoenix. The same brand message highlights social connection in Seattle where temperatures are moderate. These aren't separate campaigns. They're a single intelligent system generating infinite variations optimized for context and audience.

Smartly's platform demonstrates this approach at scale. The system can transform static images into animations, generate personalized ad variations in minutes rather than hours, and dynamically reformat content across different platforms—Instagram Stories, TikTok, LinkedIn feed, and more—without manual intervention.

But this capability only becomes powerful when paired with intelligent optimization that shifts budget in real-time toward variations and audiences actually driving conversions.

The implications for creative teams are profound. Rather than eliminating creative work, intelligent creative liberates it. Repetitive production tasks—resizing content, generating variations, formatting for different platforms—fall to AI.

This frees creative professionals to focus on the strategic and conceptual work that requires human insight: understanding consumer psychology, identifying cultural moments worth capturing, and developing brand narratives that resonate emotionally.

Desmond emphasizes that this approach doesn't mean surrendering human judgment to algorithms. Instead, it's about establishing a partnership. AI handles the production scale and real-time optimization. Humans handle the strategy, the big creative ideas, and the brand positioning that ensure campaigns feel authentic rather than algorithmic.

The result is what Desmond calls a “renaissance for creativity”—where AI amplifies human creative ability rather than replacing it.

Early data supports this model. Smartly's validation by PwC demonstrates measurable impact: brands achieve 5.5x return on ad spend and save 42 minutes every hour through intelligent creative automation. These aren't marginal improvements. They're the kind of performance gains that reshape business economics.

The Advance 2025 Forum: Convening the Industry Around Responsible AI

Understanding that AI's impact on advertising extends beyond any single company, Laura Desmond created Advance 2025—a global forum convening the industry's most influential leaders to debate the future of creativity, technology, and consumer connection.

Often described as advertising's “Davos,” Advance brings together CMOs from Fortune 500 brands, platform representatives from Meta and Google, storytellers and creative leaders, and academic experts to grapple with the most pressing questions facing modern marketing.

What makes Advance significant is its focus on responsible AI implementation. As Smartly processes 92 billion creative signals daily, the company has accepted a responsibility that many ad tech platforms avoid: ensuring that AI deployment respects consumer privacy, maintains brand safety, and operates within ethical boundaries.

Desmond articulates a clear philosophy:

“Without trust, there is nothing for brands.”

This isn't a marketing slogan. It's a fundamental principle shaping how Smartly builds its technology. The company maintains a privacy-first architecture that avoids data scraping and relies only on publicly sourced models to protect creators and consumers.

This approach distinguishes Smartly from competitors who treat consumer data as a freely harvestable resource.

The Advance 2025 forum extends this principle across the industry. By convening leaders to discuss responsible AI, the forum acknowledges that the future of advertising depends on building systems consumers and regulators can trust.

Brands that succeed in the AI era will be those that use advanced technology to deliver genuine value to consumers—better personalization, more relevant messaging, less ad clutter—rather than those that use AI as a pretext for increased surveillance and data extraction.

This distinction matters more as regulatory scrutiny around AI intensifies. Companies building responsible AI systems today will navigate regulatory change more smoothly than competitors focused solely on capability without ethics.

For CMOs evaluating AI vendors and platform partners, Desmond's emphasis on responsible AI should be a key criterion in vendor selection.

Leadership at Algorithm Speed: Execution, Fearlessness, and Daily Progress

Throughout her career, from becoming the youngest CEO in Starcom's history at age 35 to leading Publicis Groupe as Chief Revenue Officer, Laura Desmond has embodied a leadership philosophy centered on velocity and execution.

“Get things done.”

This isn't about reckless speed. It's about maintaining clarity on objectives while moving decisively within constraints.

This leadership approach becomes essential in an AI-powered environment where the pace of change accelerates across nearly every dimension. Consumer preferences shift faster. Competitive dynamics evolve rapidly. Platform algorithm changes can render strategies obsolete within weeks.

In this context, the ability to make decisions, execute, measure, learn, and iterate—all faster than competitors—becomes a sustainable competitive advantage.

Desmond's leadership model challenges the risk-averse, consensus-building approach that characterizes many marketing organizations. Intelligent creative requires experimentation—testing variations, learning from signals, and adjusting course.

This methodology only works if the organization tolerates the inevitable failures that accompany rapid iteration. Desmond's approach creates psychological safety around intelligent risk-taking. She expects teams to have a mission, to understand trade-offs, and to execute with confidence rather than seeking perfect information before acting.

For CMOs wanting to implement similar approaches in their organizations, this requires cultural change. Many marketing organizations are structured around campaign-cycle thinking—research, planning, creative development, launch, measurement.

Intelligent creative requires parallel, iterative workflows. Creatives produce initial concepts. AI generates variations. The system measures performance across variations in real-time. Winning variations get amplified.

This cycle completes in hours or days, not quarters.

This acceleration demands that marketing teams develop strong decision-making frameworks and trust from leadership. Without these elements, rapid iteration becomes chaos. With them, it becomes a competitive moat.

CMOs who can build organizations that execute at algorithm speed—where teams trust each other, understand the mission, and move with confidence—will outpace competitors stuck in traditional planning cycles.

Key Takeaways: Practical Implications for Modern CMOs

Frequently Asked Questions

How does "intelligent creative" differ from traditional dynamic creative optimization?

Intelligent creative goes beyond traditional dynamic creative optimization (DCO) by incorporating real-time consumer signals beyond just audience segments. While DCO typically personalizes based on predefined audience buckets, intelligent creative uses AI to adapt messaging, formats, and even video content based on contextual signals like weather, cultural moments, competitive activity, and individual behavior patterns—all happening automatically and simultaneously across campaigns.

What skills should CMOs develop to succeed in an AI-powered marketing environment?

Effective CMOs in the AI era need hybrid skill sets combining strategic marketing expertise with AI literacy. This includes understanding how machine learning works, knowing how to brief AI systems with clear objectives, interpreting AI-generated insights and recommendations, maintaining human oversight of algorithmic decisions, and—perhaps most importantly—preserving authentic human creativity while leveraging automation. Technical depth isn't required; informed partnership with AI systems is essential.

How can CMOs ensure responsible AI implementation doesn't compromise competitive advantage?

Responsible AI becomes a competitive advantage rather than a constraint when implemented strategically. Privacy-first systems build consumer trust and regulatory resilience. Ethical data practices reduce brand risk. Transparent AI recommendations help CMOs maintain oversight and accountability.

Brands that implement responsible AI now avoid future regulatory friction and build customer loyalty. The companies that will face competitive disadvantage are those treating AI as an opportunity to exploit consumer data.

What's the relationship between CMO growth in responsibility and budget allocation?

As CMOs demonstrate impact on revenue growth—not just marketing efficiency—boards and CFOs increasingly allocate resources accordingly. AI systems that accelerate decision-making and prove ROI with hard data (like PwC-validated 5.5x ROAS improvements) provide the evidence for expanded budgets.

CMOs who use intelligent creative to drive measurable business growth can make compelling cases for investment in additional AI capabilities, talent, and platforms.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Marketing Leadership

The conversation between Matt Britton and Laura Desmond captures a pivotal moment in marketing's evolution. AI isn't a future trend to monitor—it's a present force reshaping how campaigns are built, optimized, and measured.

CMOs who embrace this transformation, investing in the skills, technologies, and organizational cultures required to operate at algorithm speed, will emerge as the most valuable executives in their organizations.

For CMOs seeking deeper insights into AI's impact on marketing, consumer behavior, and organizational transformation, the resources below offer comprehensive exploration:

The CMOs who invest in understanding these dynamics today will be positioned to lead confidently through the AI-powered marketing landscape of tomorrow.