Key Themes at SXSW 2026 with Omnicom's Greg Brown

Greg Brown (00:00)

Hi, I'm Greg Brown, SVP of Innovation with Omnicom's DAS Group of Agencies, and you are listening to the CPG Guys podcast.

PVSB (00:11)

Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast. I'm your gregarious co-host, PVSB. I also moonlight of head of the industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. My co-host, he's the father of pop stars, Rhea Raj and Katseye's Lara Raj. The fans call him, of course, Papa Raj. He's also the chief revenue officer at ThinkBlue Consulting. More importantly, he is my best friend. He's my ride or die.

Papa Raj (00:12)

to them.

PVSB (00:38)

Please help me welcome the man known as Sri. Hey Sri, are you getting ready for Coachella? What's on the horizon for you, man?

Papa Raj (00:45)

Peter Bond. So prior to that, I'm headed to Arizona tomorrow because Rhea is performing at the Arizona State University annual fest. There's huge crowds expected. they asked us if we're bringing our own security. Then the talk of the family last night.

PVSB (00:57)

Do they know that you're

the security? Do they know that you're the muscle there? That you're the craft service here? Look at those guns. Look at those guns. Those ones, I know you have.

Papa Raj (01:05)

We're ready. You know I've been practicing. And then

the talk of the family last night at midnight when both kids were home after practicing Luria for tomorrow and then Laura for Coachella was who gets the artist pass and who gets the VIP pass that gives you 10 feet closer to the stage or not at Coachella. That's what that's the problems we're dealing with in this family now. I don't know what world problems they are. Zero world problems. don't know.

PVSB (01:26)

These are called first world problems, aren't they, Sri? They're not my world problems,

I can tell you that much. Lollapalooza.

Papa Raj (01:32)

I don't know. And then Lollapalooza is next. So I'm like, okay, I'll take what I get. But how

about we focus on getting me front backstage for Lollapalooza in Chicago? I'll take that one.

PVSB (01:41)

All right,

we'll do that, Sri. Thanks again for joining me. I want to remind our audience, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform, be it Apple, Spotify, YouTube, whatever. And particularly if you're using Apple or Spotify while you're there, give us a rating. Why? Because it helps make our podcast more findable by industry contemporaries of yours who are interested in being educated and entertained. So our favorite number is five, right? But that's up to you.

Papa Raj (01:48)

This is.

PVSB (02:08)

It's really what you think we're doing. Sure, you like five, right? I like five. I like five. He likes five. OK. Hit five. I like it. I like it. All right. Let's get to our guest. Every year, South by Southwest generates a lot of takes, hot ones, lukewarm ones, and the kind that sound profound at 11 o'clock PM in Austin, and a little bit less so on the flight home.

Papa Raj (02:13)

Yeah, people can just use an AI button, hit it to make it five. mean, that easy.

PVSB (02:34)

But occasionally someone does the hard work of cutting through the noise and actually synthesizing what it all means for our industry. That's exactly what Omnicom did this year. Omnicom just published their South by Southwest 2026 recap. It's not a highlight reel. It's a serious piece of strategic thinking built around six themes that map where the influence is migrating and by extension, where growth opportunities are opening up for brands.

The thought line, we move from a reach economy to a trust economy and the playbook has fundamentally changed. Joining us today is one of the architects of the report. He's the SVP of innovation at the Omnicom DAS group of agencies. And he was on the ground in Austin helping to assemble these insights from across the Omnicom network. Greg Brown, welcome to the CPG guys. How you doing?

Greg Brown (03:29)

Doing well, thanks for having me. Also didn't know I was gonna be in the midst of some like modern day pop royalty on this podcast, so excited to be here.

PVSB (03:40)

We like to spring it on some of our guests who may not be as well aware. To those in the audience who aren't aware, if you get a chance, go to Netflix, look for Pop Star Academy. You can see the six-part mini-series, which chronicles the creation of the band Cat's Eye from over 100,000 female applicants down to the six that were ultimately selected, including Sri's younger daughter, Laura.

But it's a great story. Yes. Sri is Sri's got his own little following. it's quite interesting. But thank you Greg before we get To the to the questions. Why don't you tell us a little bit about DAS and your role there?

Greg Brown (04:19)

Sure, so ⁓ I'm SVP of innovation with Omnicom's DAS group of agencies and kind of in simple terms, my job is to help our agencies be more innovative, ⁓ apply more innovation and technology into all of the work they do. That can be in part collaborator, part consultant jumping in on projects and big ideas with our agencies and their clients.

Lately over the past, you know, a couple of years, it's really turned into a lot of applied AI R and D. So helping them think one, two, three steps down the line, you know, ⁓ past sort of the tooling and tech we have today. And then for events like South By and CES and CAN, kind of putting our own lens and spin on those events to make them more useful for our folks on the ground.

to better guide clients through the events and sort of pick out what's important, show them what's important. So that's why I'm here today.

PVSB (05:19)

Well, this will be a great recap and we'll have you back after Cannes Lions probably to have you do that. I know that obviously Omnicom has a very large activation there and this year the CPG guys have their own residents. We're going to be just a hop, skip and a jump across the other side of the Palais with our residents. So all sorts of stuff going on at Cannes, but let's focus on South by Southwest. To our audience, please check the digital show notes of this episode. You're going to find links to Greg's LinkedIn profile.

⁓ Omnicom's corporate site and a link to where you can access the SXSW recap report that we're gonna be talking in detail about today. Definitely go check that out. This is a very meaty report. I gobbled it up and I know Sri did too the minute we saw it. So let's get to the questions. I'll kick it off. Omnicom SXSW recap is titled, Where Growth is Moving Next. What's the single most unexpected signal you picked up in Austin that confirmed that

this framing was right for you personally.

Greg Brown (06:21)

Yeah, I mean, just to set the stage real quick too for South by and sort of how it's evolved and where it's at today, especially this year. It's not a pure tech or consumer technology event like CES. It's not pure industry like can, it's not a shop talk, but it's evolved and specifically the track that interests us the most used to be called interactive. Now it's called innovation. And it's really turned into a lot of big thorny

vital questions, a lot of questions being asked and you get participants from all parts of society and from around the globe, from government to brands and ad and marketing folks like ourselves and educators and a huge crossover into music and TV and film. And so we did this massive exercise prior to the conference where we did a big sort of deep dive and sort of insight and question gathering questions, synthesizing exercise. The first

The first thing really was, ⁓ especially compared to last year, AI, like, of course, was everywhere and was everything, but it wasn't a track. Like, AI was just the operating environment. So AI in practice, AI and human capacity, AI and brains and marketing, agents and agentic systems and work and health and design and climate. So it wasn't just an AI silo. It was...

the lens through which everything else I think was being processed. A couple of the signals, I know you asked for one, but a couple of them, one of the kind of most interesting things is I think some of the more effective, let's say activations or moments at the entire festival were scrappy and cost almost nothing. So we have a colleague, Sarah DiVanzo, who's the chief innovation officer at Porter Novelli and not Fleishman-Hillard. ⁓

She spent about 200 bucks at Kinko's and bought some purple wigs and various props at Amazon and tied to her session on futurism and having a futurist that's an AI. She just went out on the streets and generated her own buzz and media coverage, which at $200 is probably quite a bit cheaper than maybe what other brands tried there. Hulu.

did something kind of in a similar way where they had a bunch of women in purple outfits and a big school bus and blueberry pies, which is this sort of creepy, strange thing to see in the streets to support one of their new shows. again, kind of like scrappy activations versus big budget ones. So that's sort of one part. ⁓ And then another, I think, is

there was a big overarching question of sort of the AI versus humans. What becomes of humans and our creativity and our own agency? How do the two things play together? And I think the answer from what I heard and listening to all the different tracks and sessions, it's not an either or thing and it's not just an interplay between the two, but I think there's this sort of new system emerging that's sort of a dual native

brand and technology system, ⁓ where you don't just think of the human element and the AI element, but everything you do as a brand, as a company, as agencies and how we service clients and brands, kind of needs to be both machine readable and also human readable or human connected. So we think about the data underneath, we think about the prompting, we think about...

you know, agentic systems and AI discovery. That's the machine readable part. think the sort of human readable part, that's the stuff that consumers are going to connect to. That's the, the campaigns we create. That's even just the work that we show and talk to our clients about on a, on a day-to-day basis. So instead of a, a pure sort of either or, or just sort of an interplay, I think it's, kind of in this new, the signal to me, maybe a new system where, it's really sort of dual.

dual native, it's machine readable and human readable at the same time.

Papa Raj (10:26)

Peter next year

we got to show up at South by Southwest. It's one of the conferences we've typically missed year over year over year and just listening to Greg speak. I'm like, why won't be there in the first place? That will be like.

PVSB (10:36)

We'll have to do,

we need one of those conference scheduling wedges that like opens up room for us. Our problem is that we're so over scheduled. I agree with you. You and I, you and I went a couple of years ago. We went a couple of years ago.

Papa Raj (10:42)

That's true, true, true.

I but we've prioritized Cannes Lions, we've prioritized

CES in Cannes Lions, we've found the grocery shops, the shop dogs, SXSW impossible just feel like a mystery. That said, there was a provocative promise made in the report that it actually opens up with and I love the hypothesis of this which is

PVSB (10:58)

Yeah, I agree.

Papa Raj (11:09)

The era of reach driven growth is closing for CPG brands that have built entire commercial models around scale and mass awareness, which is 85 % of every large CPG brand that exists. That commercial model is built around distribution, starting with Walmart down to tops, grocers. The more the distribution that's considered conquest and a win. In fact, I would reward my salespeople at General Mills for distribution.

is disruptive at this point and that it's breaking apart. How urgently should those brands be acting because they're not?

Greg Brown (11:43)

I would say urgent. And I would say this is fundamentally, disruptive. It's not just a sort of theoretical, but this is sort of an existential question of the time. And I think, you know, the, the model that built CPG empires from, you know, mass awareness, the shelf placement, media weight, and sort of the, the previous model.

assumes a discovery layer and that discovery layer is being completely disassembled right now as we speak. So think a way to sort of frame it looking forward is like, how do we reinvent discovery? That's a major theme area. What does brain relevance look like when discovery is almost entirely AI disrupted? Is our web internet economic model broken?

maybe probably what replaces that and then again, sort of this creativity and identity.

Papa Raj (12:39)

I'll tell you Greg in my other venture, which is a consulting company, ThinkBlue, we're working across retail and CPG, the impact of AI on shopping. We've also done consumer research while the consumer says, I'm here, I'm using AI. Retailers are in complete denial that it's inactive today. mean, it like, my mind explodes.

Greg Brown (13:01)

Yeah, on the one hand, I mean, there's definitely a difference between kind of what you hear and see perhaps on the sort of the marketing side on big organizations and what consumers are doing knowingly or not on a day-to-day basis in terms of how they think about AI or if they think about AI. That's another question to kind of ponder. But, you know, the data, there was a session at South by I think appropriately titled is search totally fucked.

another one called, you know, AI killed your website traffic. And I think the idea was to help quantify that scale. And of course the short version is this is a very significant development. is accelerating the click through rates on Google results are, are plummeting after, you know, AI overviews, queries and gen AI platforms and LLMs are, you know, representing a

a growing daily, growing portion of all searches. And you have so many consumers who just maybe don't click through to brand or retailer sites anymore. So that old model just optimizing for those top links is breaking and breaking in real time.

Papa Raj (14:10)

Preach Brothers,

say it again, old models, optifies for the 80s business of scaling via distribution. Would you therefore conclude dying fast on a vine fair, Greg?

Greg Brown (14:22)

⁓ Dying fast on a vine. will also, you know, I would point out that, you know, we're all kind of figuring this out together as well. Anyone that tells you they have the solution or the answer today is probably not right. But anyone that's telling you, the old model is dying and yes, there are a whole slew of new strategies, ways to think and things to try and experiment.

in order to show up in this new sort of paradigm, that's sort of who I would be listening to. And I think that's how brands need to think, that's how agencies need to think. There's not a silver bullet. There are a lot of different things that we need to be trying and that we're trying for our clients as well.

PVSB (15:06)

I don't know. I like the 80s. That was my jam. If I could get a DeLorean or a hot tub to get me back, I probably could live in my own little nirvana there. But that's neither here nor there. Greg, the report describes a scramble from SEO to AEO or answer engine optimization Yeah. No, that's a little earlier than the 80s tree.

Papa Raj (15:20)

You also want the Beatles as that on your playlist every day about Beatles bone. Yeah I guess probably

thinking cycles for what show have I showed up on

Greg Brown (15:30)

I've been in a huge Beatles and Paul McCartney phase the past couple of years, so I'm into that as well.

PVSB (15:37)

Nothing wrong with that.

Papa Raj (15:37)

Meanwhile, other than Katseye here,

I am waiting to go to Coachella. Do you know what I'm prioritizing? Nine inch nails.

PVSB (15:43)

⁓ jeez, listen to you. All right. But back to my question, the move from SEO to AEO or answer engine optimization for CPG brands whose products live on retailer shelves and are promoted on retail media platforms, what does it mean practically when an AI agent intercepts a shopper before they ever reach a PDP?

Greg Brown (15:45)

I don't blame you.

Yeah, and you can call it, know, AEO, can call it GEO, you know, generative engine optimization. But this was one of the questions that was clearly one of, if not the most urgent in our kind of pre-event analysis. Like what becomes, you know, what becomes of brain relevance when discovery is entirely AI disrupted? It showed up in a ton of sessions across.

across the track and the conference this year. AI assistants, autonomous agents, they're intercepting users before they reach the brand's app storefront PDB page. And if the AI does not find you, the human never will find you. So we need to start thinking in those terms. And again, think, as I said towards the top, how do we make a brand machine readable?

What does that look like? You need to be auditing your brand in practical terms for brand visibility. There are various, I would say, implications from a measurement, a creative channel perspective. But I think for CPG specifically, if an AI agent can recommend a detergent

and compare prices and then add it to a cart without the consumer ever seeing a brand page. Like, yeah, the entire sort of prior old model investment has been disintermediated entirely. And I think the question and then the answer coming out of the conference is that it's, like I said earlier, not just any one thing.

but we have to sort of rethink about what it means to be a credible, as a brand, as a company, what it means to be a credible, verifiable, trusted source that then AI agents will feel confident in giving them human qualities, but AI agents will feel confident recommending. And when we think about, from the report itself, called, we talked about brand distinction at scale.

This is creativity that can operate both inside these machine readable, these algorithmic systems, but still resonate with an end consumer. It still resonates. But if you don't have distinction, the scale is not going to matter. If you do have scale but no distinction, you will be invisible. So I think for...

many, if not most brands, and especially for CPG, you need to be thinking about both. How do you become distinctive? How do you also still manage that scale? And again, back to that sort of being a trusted source, being a verifiable and credible source of information, whether that's product information, safety information, but something that AI agents can confidently recommend, that's really key.

Papa Raj (18:55)

Then how

does such a big ecosystem like Amazon say I'm going to put a wall garden against external AI and just keep it to my Rufus. But Walmart, is now, you know, Amazon and Walmart are fighting for who is the largest company in the world. But Walmart embraces it and says, I'm going to open up my platform for AI agents to find products on my platform, but I'm also going to have my own sparky like Amazon has Rufus. Is Amazon that epic? ⁓

Greg Brown (19:24)

you

Papa Raj (19:25)

on the path to purchase on the customer journey, they're going to show up on Amazon to search versus searching the general AI ecosystem. Is it that order of confidence and supremacy that's allowing them to do that? Or is it a mistake?

Greg Brown (19:39)

You know, I'll couch this and reiterate that everyone is clearly figuring this out in real time. And I wouldn't necessarily, or I can't speak to Walmart's strategy versus Amazon's strategy and necessarily say which one is right or not. But if you are a brand,

And even Target, I think, has taken kind of a hybrid approach. The CloudFlare's CEO, Matthew Prince, talked at South By about the internet after search, and I think talked about these three different models, what the three retailers are doing. Again, we don't know kind of how this ends, but if you are a brand, I think the...

the way to think about this is not to bet on one approach over the other, right? Your approach needs to be platform agnostic, especially if you're thinking of maybe Walmart versus Amazon. But if you try to optimize, I would say this is true maybe of LLMs and sort of AI discovery in general. I think you need to be platform agnostic and LLM agnostic because as we've seen in this space, like,

the what is reality today looks could be entirely different, you know, next week. One LLM today is superior at X, Y, and Z. Next week is going to be a different LLM. One approach to retail today could completely change next week. And so as CPG brands, I would say B platform and LLM agnostic, even on the Walmart Amazon question.

⁓ but again, if you optimize just for one single approach or one single, retailer and something flips or one of them loses, you know, you're, you're exposed. so brand equity, that appeals to an AI agent needs to be something that can be sort of pointed to a recommended to, regardless of the platform, regardless of the architecture, which kind of

brings it back to like how do you just become a genuinely preferred brand, not just sort of betting on one retailer or marketplace or just well placed on one.

Papa Raj (21:53)

Although I got a feeling AI is going to force that outcome anyway, that instead of pricing and value of value of the moment, occasion of the price that you're buying something for discount promo driving, it's going to force this notion of genuinely loved skew down to skew. And that's what people are going to replenish time and time again. It's going to feature so many things like ratings and reviews.

the PDP, the product ingredient information is just going to become a whole lot easier in a way.

Greg Brown (22:25)

Thank you.

Yeah, and I think the brands that recognize that and can start building for that or towards that will likely have an advantage and one that probably compounds over time. Again, back to sort of this urgency question, even if you don't have all the right answers today, the danger or the downside is not experimenting and not trying these new ways of

⁓ sort of building your brands and also connecting to consumers.

PVSB (22:58)

Well, I don't have the incrementality numbers on this, but I can share why brands are getting very excited about these agents. In some preliminary analysis on sponsored ads going into Rufus, Flywheel's seeing the ROAS. Ready for this, guys? $100. $100 ROAS. Now, you believe that LLMs, yes, Sri, if you believe that LLMs,

are highly incremental to begin with, and that's what most of the research shows. How much of that is going to be incremental? We'll get those numbers soon, but jeez, Sri, $100 ROAS, there's a lot of value in these agents. And the question is, do you expand to try to get more of it, or are you trying to protect your own space? Very interesting things. So Greg, the report argues that attention is becoming a byproduct.

of involvement. CPG has historically been a category defined by passive consumption, right? People don't typically fandom their dish soap the way they do the CPG guys or Papa Rush. Where do you see genuine participation led growth opportunities for everyday CPG brands?

Greg Brown (24:13)

I mean, you could argue that CPG brands, actually, fandom could actually apply to them. Like think of a scrub daddy who spent years choosing to ask and hopefully have their consumers answer, is this content funny versus does this spot or does this ad perform?

And then I think, you in the beauty space, it's easy to point to, but I think they do so much right. Like an elf beauty, their community was DIYing their own lip kits. And instead of kind of fighting the DIY, Elf leaned into it and started making, I think very quickly, these kinds of DIY and DIY-based lip kits and offerings.

So it's not, you you can see these sort of examples of audiences turning into, and I would say fandoms can happen in unexpected places and unexpected ways, but it involves, I think, thinking a little bit differently. And I think fandom was one of the big topics as part of maybe the larger like creator economy conversation at South By. But I think that

that conversation emerged and evolved from just like influencer engagements and creator engagements to how these people are actually like themselves restructuring media and commerce and brand building. So sort of fandom as infrastructure. And I think for us sort of in the broader industry thinking about fandom as replacing audience as one of the organizing concepts for how

you know, we sort of tap into culture or how cultural value is built. You know, a fan isn't just someone who watches. A fan invests their identity and their voluntary labor into something. And again, you could be a sponge and you could be a sponge and actually just think about the question differently or ask different questions maybe than you did before to actually sort of build and foster this.

this sort of fandom as well. And really, think, lean into and build sort of loyalty through this community and consistent behavior over time. And then think another, I think one of the sessions was, you know, the death of passive entertainment, which I think could be useful. So the community that people want or consumers want is something

synchronous. It's a synchronous experience, maybe a live experience, but I think the broader argument fandom itself is sort of a, it's not just limited to entertainment. It's not just limited to sports. I think it's a good framework to think about how people might engage with anything they care about, again, from toothpaste to a sponge or to something like, you know, F1 had a huge presence this year and lots of sort of

⁓ panels and discussions and F1 of course, sort of ground zero for fandom these days with, with everything that they've done. but I think thinking about community and fandom too, as a, kind of a, a structural asset, like an infrastructure, not just a marketing tactic and not just one that only certain brands can do. I think if you think about these, these communities,

again, is something bigger than just a delivery mechanism. Just think about like, what exists when you stop spending? Like when the budget stops, is there something there that like that might exist? And I think asking those questions, even if you're not gonna be scrub daddy at the end of the day, I think it helped you think differently and sort of help win the next generation.

Papa Raj (28:04)

So let's talk about the next generation. Let's go deep, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. Lots of conversations specifically. Our industry again is run by, is it safe to say boomers, Peter? And, or what are we Peter? Gen X? Gen X. Our industry is now run by boomers and Gen X who are always rejecting this notion of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Cause they're like, they don't have the wallet. It's owned by boomers and Gen X.

but that was specifically called out. They don't reject branded content. They reject inauthentic content. And that's what social is all about, authentic content by creators and Gen X and boomers still don't have accounts on social media platforms, leave alone participating in learning. What's the line between a CPG brand showing up credibly in culture versus coming across as cringe?

Greg Brown (29:02)

there's a lot of cringe. Yes. There were sessions at South by this year, like literally called, you know, don't be cringe. so this was a huge question that emerged sort of pre-event. how did we reach Gen Z?

Papa Raj (29:17)

I

got the CPG guys cringe.

PVSB (29:20)

Sri, my daughter yesterday said dad that's so cringe. I know.

Greg Brown (29:20)

I'd no comment.

Papa Raj (29:22)

I don't want your opinion, I want the rights.

Greg Brown (29:25)

No comment

from me.

Papa Raj (29:28)

He said

no comment. Did hear that man? We're cringe bro.

PVSB (29:31)

My daughter says I'm cringe. Seven years old, she used that term yesterday. I'm cringe.

Greg Brown (29:36)

Well, my boy has turned five today and I'm not too far away despite how cool I think, I know I am. But yeah, I think the, you what are the takeaways from this festival and sort of in general in the moment we're at today is, you know, what authenticity means and I don't like that word, but it's not that like Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

are looking for authentic versus inauthentic. think they're rejecting lazy content. They're rejecting content where brands are clearly trying to look or feel casual or use the latest slang and acting like they're not a brand necessarily. think more than anything, it's like being as a brand, being consistent over time.

not necessarily through, although partially through media weight, but there's definitely a lot of, I would say, organizational inertia against sort of tapping into or wanting to reach Gen Z or Gen Alpha on their terms. There's sort of organizational operational speed and risk tolerance that can get in the way

of that sometimes. But I think there's a sort of bigger structural stuff at play with these generations who are carrying the burden of financial stress and opportunities that existed even for a millennial like me that doesn't exist for them. They are spending accordingly. I think they're selective in certain ways that

The rest of us millennial Gen Xers, it might not be. So I think just they've grown up not to be necessarily anti-brand, because obviously some of them are very pro-brand, but their selection criteria looks a little bit different maybe than ours did. And so I think just it's hard, maybe hard to do in practice, easier to say, but sort of showing up with some kind of genuine

Creative or brand ambition and point of view I think is more relatable and less cringe than trying to be relatable again, like the the The the scrub daddies of the world I don't mean to keep talking about that particular sort of use case but like Commit to what it is you want to do or the questions you think are worth asking besides just you know How do we connect with Gen Z and Gen Alpha?

and lean into that and be consistent because I think if you do that, that becomes genuine. I don't want to say authentic. That's a genuine way to sort of show up as a brand. The algorithm will follow. The algorithm is downstream from culture, not necessarily upstream. And then one other word or concept that's been thrown about for years now is co-creation.

But I think we can think about co-creation, but co-production is maybe take that a little bit of a step further. a creator, one of their assets is their point of view or their specificity. And brands can provide the scale. You don't necessarily need to sort of co-create with them, but allow them to be sort of producers of the brand as a recognizable voice, as someone who has

not just an audience, but fans. So I think, I won't say authenticity, but if you show up in a genuine way, there's a relationship to invest in. And Gen Z, Gen Alpha will see that.

PVSB (33:16)

Let me remind our audience that today we're speaking with Greg Brown. He's the Senior Vice President of Innovation at Omnicom's DAS Group of Agencies. So one of the contributors warned about brain atrophy from AI over reliance. And the report concludes that the most valuable future traits will be discernment, taste, and emotional intelligence. The CPG brands accelerate AI adoption, Greg, across the content.

Greg Brown (33:16)

Yeah.

PVSB (33:42)

commerce, and even consumer insights. Where's the line?

Greg Brown (33:47)

I think, especially from the Silicon Valley kind of AI frontier folks about, you know, the fact that, okay, now, now it's taste. Taste is going to be differentiator as a consumer or as a curator. We're going to look for people for their, for their taste. But I think

Discernment, taste, emotional intelligence are all very important right now, and I think very important to talk about in terms of our new sort of AI first world. But discernment, taste, and emotional intelligence are also not necessarily brand new concepts. Anytime there's a new tech paradigm, say the invention of the camera and photographs and you as a consumer or you as an artist,

You know, do you have taste? Are you creative when you're creating with a camera instead of a paintbrush? I think these are arguments and cycles that have just sort of repeated over time and become more or less important depending on what that tech paradigm is or says. But I do think, yeah, discernment, taste, emotional intelligence are very...

heightened right now or the need for those things are very heightened. But I'll go back to sort of the dual native way we should be thinking about brands as both machine readable and human readable. And I think that sort of human capability should also be like, should be supercharged by machine intelligence. And I think, you know, to get more into the philosophical kind of media theory.

of like a Marshall McLuhan, you know, we're sort of cutting off one appendage and perhaps building new ones. I do think like cognitive atrophy, thinking, like thinking's a muscle. We don't necessarily wanna outsource all of that necessarily, but I do think, you know, one of the sort of takeaways from the analysis we did, and then I think,

applying that to the work that we do and maybe to CPG brands. Human specificity and human taste, I think is going to be, at least for a period, an appreciating asset. if AI can make average or competent content for free at scale, if you as a brand can make that content,

effectively at zero and at scale, I think the market will begin to price human craft and editorial judgment and emotional residents and your brand, brand specificity and brand point of view like at a premium. So I don't think there's sort of necessarily a one-to-one replacement of like human imagination versus machine capability like replacing one or the other.

⁓ but you know, if you're thinking as a CPG marketer, like how do we, or, or product design even, you know, talking about like AI does something for you versus AI helps you do something better. Like those are different philosophies and can help us build, sort of as brands build deeper trust with consumers, at the end of the day.

Papa Raj (36:59)

Speaking of emotional

residents that you've already referred to, the report also talked about the EIQ economy with E being that very emotional component, emotional intelligence. What does that look like in practice for a CPG marketer who's building campaigns in 2026?

Greg Brown (37:17)

yeah, I think sort of to, to build on the last answer a little bit is, you know, when you, when you lead with CPG marketer and you lead with emotional intelligence, you're thinking or you're asking, like, what does this person actually feel before they reach our product? Like not, not what keyword triggered a conversion necessarily. Like,

I'm not discounting the data layer. Obviously that's one of, if not the most important pieces here. But I think brands and CPG brands that can better understand the emotional mechanics at the same depth that they understand maybe the media mechanics can win or differentiate themselves. So designing campaigns that to get back to some of the bigger

deeper structural things that are happening in society and the world right now, like some type of acknowledgement about what your consumer and maybe especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, what they are going through. Acknowledging that is important, not just acknowledging kind of what they're buying. If you're a wellness brand, think about not just health outcomes.

but there's a big conversation happening today about sort of the social health, not just sort of physical and mental health, but social health. So if you're wellness brand, think about products and positioning products that help with connection outcomes, like move past just health outcomes. Acknowledging the emotional labor of

household management, if you're a cleaning ran, not just sort of the functional benefit. And I know that gets into maybe some, some heady space that, that CPG brands, sort of retail might not normally sort of think about, but some type of like acknowledgement of, of that kind of stuff, I think, ends up resonating, especially in sort of this AI first data driven world. it's not just the nutrition facts, but you know, what, what a meal.

can actually mean in someone's day.

PVSB (39:28)

One of the themes the report explores is about how live is becoming a spectrum in and of itself. Physical, virtual, synchronous, persistent, with examples from the Sphere, something that Sri and I love when we go to Las Vegas. We went to one concert there. To Daft Punk that appears inside of ⁓ Fortnite.

What's the realistic on ramp though for CPG brands to participate in these kind of immersive experience led growth, but not on Las Vegas budget?

Greg Brown (40:01)

one thing I was thinking about and, and we all sort of know this, like CPG brands, sit in our most intimate, vulnerable spaces, right? On a, on a day to day life in our homes, in our bathrooms, ⁓ in our kitchens. so there's in some degree, like to some degree, they actually already have a certain proximity to like our daily and emotional life that,

tech companies might not. So I don't know, there's something there, but I think live experiences, and I'll go back to maybe one of the things I talked about up top about, at South By there are brand activations. Rivian was there this year and they do a big sort of driving test, off-road crawling kind of thing. It's visually impactful, it's experiential.

You can obviously get a lot of cool moments out of something like that. But like I said, my colleague Sarah, who just went out on the street with $200 worth of Amazon props and garnered a bunch of media coverage from that. I think there's something to learn about that, where it's about thinking creatively, sometimes thinking weirder.

to actually connect on an emotional level and sort of build up that emotional infrastructure that doesn't actually require renting out the sphere for a week and spending all your budget on an F1 sponsorship necessarily. The emotional question, and I think especially as we think about like,

how younger consumers, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, are interacting with AI and how they are potentially unloading or offloading some of this emotional, outsourcing some of this emotional stuff is a big question. And I think it's a scary one as a parent, as I'm sure you all can kind of commiserate with. But I think there's a...

This came through a South by two, there's a bit of a counter current also happening, making friction good and okay and actually like a premium in how you experience a product. Pure frictionless may not actually be the most valuable thing or a valuable way to reach a consumer, building in some kind of friction or moderation, kind of these concepts that sort of run counter to maybe how we've thought about

CPG, how we thought about retail, how we thought about personalization on a mass scale. I think these are all new signals to pay attention to, analog, analog and, physical media content that came through a lot at South by this year, people handing out zines, people, having these in-person experiences. And so I, I don't know if I have like, ⁓ a core

answer to what CPG brands can think about or how they can get there without a Las Vegas fear-sized budget. But I think these signals of acknowledging the loneliness and emotional outsourcing that's happening, while also paying attention to the counter signals, whether that is an in-person event, whether that is a tangible physical good, whether that is building

friction into an experience or into a funnel. That's how I would start. That's what I start paying attention to and thinking again as sort of a counter to this sort of commercialized loneliness.

Papa Raj (43:41)

I get the honor of asking the last question for today. And it's a very simple one. You know, there were six themes in the report from SXSW 2026. What's your big advice for CPG, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Growth Officers to prioritize in the next 90 days coming out of South by Southwest? What's that one move you tell them focus on and what's the one thing you tell them, please stop.

Greg Brown (43:41)

Thank

⁓ I would prioritize for them having an answer to the question, why would an AI agent recommend us? and I think that helps kind of pull together everything we, you know, when we were going into the, the event this year, the questions that we were sort of pulling out that we thought were the really important ones to answer. but

Why would an AI agent recommend you? So the discovery model is being completely rebuilt from bot traffic to zero clicks to this sort of dual human machine readable infrastructure. There is a brand strategy question that comes into play that's above and beyond just like SEO and now AEO or GEO.

but what makes you as a brand recognizable, again, both to humans and machines in this next era. And then as we think about, you know, from the report, especially identity and intelligence and influence, knowing your consumers and who they are across touch points, also at a deeper level, earning your trust and influence by knowing kind of structurally what they're doing, thinking about

identity infrastructure and knowing your consumer along with this sort of intelligence, emotional intelligence capability and ways to act on it. The brand distinctiveness to earn that trust, to earn that influence when AI is in the middle. Like all of these things, like I said at the beginning, no one has necessarily figured it all out yet. Anyone who says there is one answer is lying. And if someone does have

one answer to it all, you know who to ignore. But it's all of these things, but all these things wrapped up in that question that you need to start building an answer to, which is why would an AI recommend us?

PVSB (46:02)

To our audience, this community does not exist without all of you. You engage with us all year long and we are grateful to have you as our audience and our partners. Thank you in particular to the now over 44,000 followers on LinkedIn. We're so grateful for that. Please follow us on all social media platforms beyond LinkedIn, which includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Sri.

Greg Brown (46:03)

Thank

PVSB (46:31)

Wow, power packed episode. What's your big takeaway?

Papa Raj (46:34)

Very straightforward Peter and we've been discussing that habitually through the course of this episode and that is the reality of the fact that I want to say so many things about cultural moments and brand building, but it's going to come back to AI. Urgent, urgent, urgent attention on AI.

And how your brand is going to be discovered today, not tomorrow, not four years from like, you know, how brands and retail dismissed e-commerce is in the future. 10 years from now, people will be home delivery and boom COVID happened. Right. And the e-commerce is building up prior to that AI is happening today. If you can't figure out how to be part of that search algorithm versus the Google friendly search algorithm, you miss the bus completely. Like that's not a lesson.

It's an urgent warning now, now, and brands are absolutely not ready. Retail sees this as the antithesis because it's going to challenge the whole notion of planograms, shelf space, and putting products on a shelf in the first place.

PVSB (47:37)

⁓ Not debatable Sri. You're absolutely on the money mines different. It's what Greg said at the beginning may have seen innocuous, but it's pretty big scale without distinction and I would argue it's Authentic distinction scale without distinction leads to invisibility If you're gonna do it, you're gonna get in you better be authentic because if you're not doesn't matter how much scale you have People aren't gonna believe you. They're not gonna listen to your brand's gonna be obscure

Greg Brown (48:00)

Thank

PVSB (48:04)

Wow, Greg, thank you for taking time out of your day to share with us your thoughts on this report and remind our audience, link to the report in the digital show notes of this episode. I'm pretty sure we're gonna have Greg back at some future events where Omnicom is publishing these reports. But Greg, thank you so much for taking time out of your day. It's great to have you here.

Papa Raj (48:10)

Thank you.

Greg Brown (48:28)

Yeah, thank you guys for having me on. This was great. I'm sure if I can get a flight out to California, I'll text you for the VIP tickets. that something we can do?

Papa Raj (48:39)

I'm trying to get our dispatches.

Greg Brown (48:40)

Artist pass, I'll text you for the artist pass.

PVSB (48:44)

I've been trying for years, Greg. I've got nothing to show for it. But I do get pictures sent to me from all these exciting events where...

Papa Raj (48:51)

Hey, you've

got the limited edition, only one of 50 signed by all the members of CATSA.

PVSB (48:54)

I do.

All

six members of cats I've got my daughter covets and just adores that book. So thank you Papa Raj came through for for for Nadia That's all we have for you today. We look forward to speaking with you on the very next episode of the CPG guys podcast. Goodbye