Inside Insights season 10 reflections: How leading brands are bringing marketing & insights closer together

When we relaunched Inside Insights last year, we made a deliberate bet: that the conversation between marketing and insights — when it happens at its best — is one of the most powerful forces in building great brands. Not two functions working in parallel, but genuine strategic partners shaping growth together.

Season 10 tested that bet. Fifteen conversations, fifteen guests from the NFL, PepsiCo, Unilever, Visa, HelloFresh, Colgate-Palmolive and more. And by the end of it, we were both a little surprised, not by how far apart these two functions still are, but by how consistently the leaders doing it well treated that connection as non-negotiable.

Here's what stayed with us:

Fragmentation isn't a data problem. It's a leadership problem.

Almost every guest this season described some version of the same reality: insights exist inside organizations, but they don’t flow. They sit in disconnected tools, buried in decks, and trapped inside functions that rarely influence the decisions that matter most.

The instinct most companies have is to buy more technology. It almost always makes it worse.

Alex Hardy at Nomad Foods runs insights across 25 European markets where two countries an hour apart can have entirely different food cultures. Michael Nevski at Visa operates at the intersection of payments data and real-time consumer behaviour at global scale. Very different industries, very different pressures — but they arrived at exactly the same place: this is a structure and leadership problem. Technology is a symptom treatment, not a solution.

The insights function needs to leave the building.

Katherine Melchior Ray has led marketing at Nike, Shiseido, Hyatt, and LVMH, and one story she told us has stayed with us since. At Nike, consumer insights became the second most anticipated presentation at regional sales meetings, right after the new campaign reveal. Not because attendance was required, but because people genuinely wanted to hear it.

That's the real ambition. Not a dashboard, not a well-designed report. A function so essential to how the business thinks that the people shaping strategy actually seek it out.

Avery Akkineni at VaynerX named the agency-side version of the same failure: the consumer insights work happening on the brand side rarely reaches the creative teams who need it most. It gets filtered out before it arrives.

The brands winning today aren't the ones doing the most research. They're the ones making insights impossible to ignore in the rooms where the biggest decisions get made.

Insights speaks research. The C-suite speaks growth. Someone needs to translate.

This came up more than we expected, and it might be the sharpest tension of the whole season. Even when insights teams are doing genuinely brilliant work, it often doesn't land — not because the findings are wrong, but because they're framed in the wrong language. Research rigour and methodology don't move CFOs. Profitability and growth do.

Sorin Patilinet at PepsiCo — an engineer by training who has spent his career sitting at the intersection of marketing effectiveness and consumer research — was direct about it: insights that can't connect to business outcomes will always be treated as a cost center, no matter how good the work is.

Carolyn Pollock, former CMO of Tailored Brands, framed the same idea more warmly — the CMO and CFO need to be best friends. And for that friendship to work, insights has to become the common language between them. 

The brands where this is already happening aren't necessarily producing more research. They're telling better stories with it, in rooms that actually have the power to act on them.

Consumer evidence is what gives you the confidence to be bold.

The idea that data and creativity pull in opposite directions — that rigour kills instinct, that the best work happens when you trust your gut and ignore the numbers — came up repeatedly this season. And every time it did, our guests pushed back on it.

Marissa Solis at the NFL made this point clearly: the brands that show up boldly on the biggest stages are the ones that understand their consumer well enough to back their instincts with evidence. Conviction and consumer understanding aren't opposites. One enables the other.

Mark Kirkham at PepsiCo Beverages and Greg Guidotti at Ferrara — two CMOs who have both operated on the biggest advertising stage in the world — were equally clear that winning the Super Bowl has nothing to do with winning the ad meter. It's about growing the business. And the brands that consistently use moments like the Super Bowl as genuine growth platforms are the ones who understand their consumer well enough to invest with real conviction. 

Chris Bellinger at PepsiCo Foods put a framework to it: 70% of budget on what you know works, 20% on near-bets, and 10% on real swings — the ideas that might just change everything. Consumer insights is what makes the 10% possible. Not by eliminating the risk, but by giving you the confidence to take it.

AI changes the speed. It doesn't change the fundamentals.

We'll be honest — we weren't sure how the AI conversations would land this season. It's a topic that can go flat quickly, either dissolving into hype or collapsing into anxiety. Neither happened.

Every guest who touched it was grounded. Nobody was breathless, and nobody predicted the end of the insights profession or the marketing function. What they offered instead was more useful: clarity about where AI actually helps and where it doesn't.

Sorin Patilinet put it simply: "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." AI can automate the repetitive, accelerate the analytical, and surface patterns that would take humans weeks to find. What it can't do is replace the judgment that comes from genuinely understanding your consumer, or the trust that comes from a marketing team that believes in the insights they're acting on. 

Richard Shotton, behavioural scientist and author of Hacking the Human Mind, grounded it in something even more fundamental: the cognitive shortcuts and emotional triggers driving human decisions haven't changed and won't — regardless of how sophisticated the tools become.

The organizations getting the most from AI are almost always the ones that already have connected insights, clear decision-making structures, and marketing and insights teams that trust each other. For everyone else, AI mostly just adds speed to existing confusion.

Fifteen episodes in, that's what Season 10 kept coming back to — not the tools, not the technology, but the people, the structures, and the conversations that make it all work.

Beyond the numbers

The numbers surprised us too. 114,000 YouTube subscribers, 5.8 million views and over 60.000 minutes of video consumed on YouTube, a consistent top 10 marketing podcast in the US — peaking at #5, and a 55.1% increase in returning viewers.

None of this happens without two groups of people we want to thank. The guests who trusted us with their time, their thinking, and their honesty — and the listeners who keep showing up because they believe, like we do, that bringing marketing and insights closer together isn't just good for business. It's how the best work gets made.

To everyone who joined us this season, thank you. The conversations were sharper, more honest, and more thought-provoking than we could have hoped for.

Season 11 is coming. And if this season was about hearing from both worlds, the next one is about putting them in the same room.

See you in Season 11!