I recently had the privilege of joining Brand Innovators in Austin during F1 Race Week. The event centred around a theme that resonates deeply with me and what I do everyday with my clients and partners; what it takes to win the digital race. It was an engaging and enlightening experience.
Hosted by Indeed, the event brought together leaders from Kendra Scott, The University of Texas at Austin,Whataburger, Tito's Handmade Vodka, Williams Racing, Visa, HP, and more. They all shared a common truth: the funnel is no longer a funnel. It’s a flywheel powered by collaboration, creativity, and community, a sentiment we all resonated with.
Partnerships and co-creations are fueling awareness that drives sales, and reach is no longer a vanity metric, and as some of the marketers saw it at the summit, it’s a signal of momentum. As one speaker said, “If you build brand love, sales will follow.”
The F1 metaphor couldn’t be more fitting: just like a pit crew works in sync to gain that extra tenth of a second, in the digital race, strategy, creative, data, and media must also work in sync to gain that extra edge that separates good brands from great ones.
Marketing is coming full circle, returning to storytelling, stirring emotion, and leaning on collaboration. It feels like everything is racing forward at breakneck speed. The game‑changer now, though, is that the tools we have available to us in our marketing toolbox allow us to fine‑tune our tactics and actually prove their effectiveness, reinforcing that AI provides tremendous potential to improve how we do things so that we can learn faster, innovate faster and get that competitive edge for a brand that is so critical.
Thank you once again to my amazing panelists, Courtney McHugh and Eryn McMahan, for making my job so easy!
