Justine Frostad, CMO of AI advertising company Cognitiv, believes the smartest move a marketer using AI can make is to admit it. "AI is most powerful when it's not pretending to be human," she told Marketing Brew in its weekly Coworking series. Frostad, who has also held roles at Sightly and The Exchange Lab, argues that transparency about AI involvement builds audience respect rather than eroding it.

Her conviction comes from practice, not theory. At Advertising Week New York last year, Cognitiv launched "Meet Edna," a campaign designed to demonstrate rather than describe the company's deep learning capabilities. "When marketing AI, it feels particularly important to actually use it and to be transparent about that choice," Frostad said. Working with agency Manual Labor, the team deliberately avoided photorealism and adopted a painterly, illustrated style. The approach, she explained, "gave the work more warmth and personality and made it clear these ads were partially AI-generated without trying to hide it."

Edna, the campaign's central character, embodies the contradictions that make audiences valuable to marketers. She "is afraid of sharks, hates swimming, and is landlocked…but loves a cruise." For Frostad, that contradiction is the point: people are nuanced, illogical, and full of misaligned signals, and those edges are where the most overlooked audiences live. "We weren't just talking about AI, we were showing how it can be used thoughtfully, transparently, and in partnership with human creativity," she said of the project.

Frostad points to Spotify Wrapped as the benchmark for turning data into connection. The annual platform transforms listening habits into something "joyful, shareable, and culturally contagious," she said. Its power lies in reframing: "It's not 'here's what you listened to'; it's 'here's who you were this year.'" She carries that lesson into her own work with AI and data. "When you can translate signals into something that feels human, reflective, even a little emotional, you're no longer just informing people, you're connecting with them."

On trends, Frostad splits her outlook. She is most optimistic about the shift toward transparency in AI usage, noting that the industry default has been to hide AI involvement "as if audiences are too naive to handle it or would reject the work if they knew." The evidence points the other way, she said: honesty about AI and why it improves the work earns audience respect and opens creative possibilities by letting AI do what it does uniquely well.

Her biggest concern is what she calls the rush toward sameness. With AI making content production faster and cheaper, and everyone optimizing against similar signals with similar tools, the result can be "a sea of 'pretty good' that lacks distinctiveness." Efficiency matters, she acknowledged, but marketing is not a volume game. "Originality continues to be the real advantage," Frostad said.

Her media diet leans deliberately outside the industry. She recommends We Can Do Hard Things, the podcast hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle, precisely because it is not a marketing show. "Great marketing is about understanding people at their most honest and complicated," she said. "If you want to tell better stories, the best way to start is by listening to people telling the truth."

Away from work, Frostad plays the ukulele, joins a beach volleyball team every summer, canoes, rarely misses hot yoga on Sundays, and pursues the perfect sandwich. All of it, she said, is a reset where you "lose track of time, forget your phone exists, and come back a little clearer."

For B2B marketers, the takeaway is direct: as AI-generated content floods channels, disclosure and distinctiveness may matter more than production volume.

Source: Marketing Brew (https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/coworking-with-justine-frostad?utm_source=&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=feed) / Source: docs.google.com (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfZQcKIrSSHr46fswnmSjnNszn6coBK-3-7ZLDeP5sEZ-wjVQ/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0)