Ambition Over Caution: Lessons from Knotch's 2025 Pros & Content Summit

Knotch’s Pros & Content Summit in New York on June 5 did not disappoint.  

Leaders across marketing, tech, and media delivered an urgent wake-up call: in the Gen AI era, playing it safe is the riskiest move of all. The future will favor those who combine data-driven precision with bold leaps of intelligent naivety—challenging assumptions, staying human, and building what others haven’t dared to try. 

This recap captures the essential insights, lessons, and quotes you need to navigate the fast-changing landscape where content is brand, ambition trumps caution, and AI is reshaping what’s possible.

So thank you to the best observers who already wrote and shared their takeaways that I have borrowed  - Catherine Tymkiw, Jess Moss, Steve Olenski, Roland Jones and also to our generous sponsors DDM, Conductor and Stacker.

Intelligent naivety wins

“As marketers, we always want to be writing the book,  not following the book.” - Micky Onvural, SEVP, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, TIAA

“Some of the big bets we've taken with women's sports are because we didn't let data make that decision. Make sure data doesn't shrink your ambition.  You can still make big, bold decisions.” - Jennifer Brockington, Executive Director Integrated Media Strategy, Advertising, Ally

“Brand is performance. We’ve got to stop thinking of them as separate.” - Jennifer Brockington

 “I hate the notion of performance marketing. Shouldn’t all marketing perform?” Ben Levine, Head of Marketing, Zillow Rentals

 “Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith with something you can’t measure and see how it seeds and grows over time.” - Micky Onvural

“Intelligent naivety allows you to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. It’s what lets you ask the questions others are too jaded to ask. It’s what helps you see cracks in the system that everyone else has learned to step over. Disrupting the norm doesn’t always come from expertise.” - Micky Onvural

Content is the brand experience

“Content is the conversation I have with my consumers or partners. Brand equity is the promise I make to the consumers or partners.” – Beverly Jackson, Vice President of Brand and Product Marketing, Zillow

“Every touch point with a customer is an opportunity to add points of brand love.” – Lauren Weinberg, Advisor, Peloton

"Content is any interaction with a customer. Brand equity is about the experience and whether you live up to it." - Mike Wente, VP, Global Brand and Creative Marketing, PayPal

“Data shows clients respond more positively to a brand that messed up and fixed it, vs a brand who never screwed up at all.”  - Stacey Gaine, Managing Director, Merrill Lynch

"We use content like a canary in the coal mine, an intelligence tool helping us understand our audience a little bit better” - David Moss, Global Head of Content

“The brand is who you are, and the content is what you do to serve the customer and help them get through the journey.” - Sam Toole, SVP, CMO, The Azek Company

“Our content is how we deepen loyalty.” - Ansley Murphy, Sr. Director Performance Mktg. at ALSAC/St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

“Our content is supposed to be the living, physical manifestation of our brand.” - David Moss

Relevance over perfection

“Relevance is really, really important. People need to see themselves in the content. We need better, more relevant content—not more content.” - Carla Zakhem-Hasan, CMO, JP Morgan Chase

“We had to boil down our temptation to personalize to the nth degree to the simple donor journey: has somebody donated before or not?” - Ansley Murphy

“ Have the humility to know what you don't know - you need technology, intuition or just a bunch of variation in testing to be able to get to those end results.”  - Ben Levine

“Photography and visuals are content too. The switch to up-close shots of our decks changed performance significantly.” - Sam Toole

“We use a content score to get predictive about what types of engagement will most likely lead to business outcomes.” - David Moss

“It’s not about what content you put out—it’s also about what you choose not to put out and when you choose to stay silent.” - Tariq Hasan, Former Chief Marketing & Digital Officer, McDonald’s

"We need to bring people what they can absorb in a format that connects with them." Stacey Gaine

Martech will need to deliver actual value

“You’re going to see a massive drop in switching costs that takes a lot of human effort.  With AI, you can do it in a more automated fashion.  It’s going to force the industry to be a lot better at delivering value, which is good for everyone here.” - Karthik Rau, CEO Contentful

“Connecting all of the (data) dots and doing it much faster than everyone else and continuing to add value is what the mode’s going to be.” - Karthik Rau

“The “three agents” model can help teams operationalize their content strategy quickly.  Each agent has a clear role:

• Brand Agent: Learns your voice, tone and structure. Ensures everything sounds like you.  It provides the context.
• SME Agent: Learns to solve a specific problem.  For example if it’s working on organic discoverability, it will learn everything possible about topics on Reddit, Google algorithm changes, and what’s ranking on LLMs.
• Analyzer Agent: Measures aggregate date sets, normalizing and then analyzing them.
  

When the 3 work together, you get the highest quality outputs.” - Anda Gansca, Co-founder and CEO, Knotch

Stay human as the AI opportunity accelerates

“AI has fundamentally changed what’s possible.  The technology is changing so quickly that the people who were innovators in AI a year ago are now almost out of date. We’re all wrong and we’re all behind because every day a new model comes out.” - Brian O’Kelley, Co-founder CEO, Scope 3

“Where personalization works is when we have empathy for the consumer—not all of it is tactical; some is tonal.” David Moss

“Agentic AI means agents will unlock operational speed, as agents can operate across platforms and data sets. (In other words, no more logging into systems like Salesforce to move a project to the next step, the AI agent can do it for you.” - Anda Gansca.

“Don't fall in love with the shiny objects of AI. Fall in love with the problems you're trying to solve, and look at how things like AI as ways to solve them.” -Tariq Hassan

“Winners will benefit from content systemization, and avoid commoditization” - David Brown. SVP, Head of Strategy, Knotch

Knotch’s call to action

AI is flipping the traditional model: content strategy used to lead with art, following with science. Now, science often sets the course—and that requires new skills, new mindsets, and new courage. 

Intelligent naivety—the ability to question assumptions and do the opposite of what the crowd expects—is becoming a critical superpower especially with the risk of commoditization as Gen AI adoption continues

And whatever AI becomes, it won’t be what we expect. That means the future belongs to those who experiment, stay curious, and keep pushing the edges of what’s possible.

The brands that thrive in the AI era will be those willing to build what others haven’t even thought to try.

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Published June 16, 2025

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