Perspectives
Marco Matos took the mic on Programmatic Pulse's Cannes special with host Sean Halpin, and somewhere between a Bronx-kid origin story and a working theory of AI video, he dropped the line that frames the whole conversation: he's not sure we've even reached the first inning of the world changing. His prediction is that it changes twice more before the year is out.
For marketers, that lands less like a thrill and more like a to-do list that keeps rewriting itself. Models shift weekly. Channels multiply. Algorithms change constantly. And underneath all of it sits the same job that existed before any of this arrived: return economic value to the business.
Fielding Fastballs
Marco has seen this movie a few times. His career ran through Microsoft, then Google (where he spent years measuring online exposure against offline behavior, watching Dollar Shave Club kick off what he calls the dawn of internet video advertising), then Meta and Pinterest. Privacy, video, mobile: each wave showed up with the same traveling companions, speed and the confusion that rides along with it.
AI is the newest wave, and the thing that's different is velocity. "People are just overwhelmed by the speed," he told Sean. Take that speed, add real technological transformation, and you get a recipe for chaos. The marketer's real problem is the clarity.
Model-Agnostic on Purpose
Here's where Marco's answer gets refreshingly un-hyped. Adora, he's clear, is "not an LLM company." It's routing technology built to sit at the application layer and pull from whichever models are strongest underneath, because the model that's great at rendering cars might be mediocre at shoes and worse at faces, and that leaderboard reshuffles constantly. Marketers already know a version of this instinct: there's the right message to the right person at the right time, and there's also the right model for the subtask of the moment.
The whole point is that the marketer shouldn't have to stress about any of it. Model choice becomes an implementation detail, akin to letting go of the waterfall in favor of RTB. What's left in front of the marketer is a set of agentic workflows plus the measurement to see what actually worked and do better on the next run. "That's where the economic returns come from," he said.
The Flywheel Remembers
Underneath the routing is the part that compounds. Data turns into content, content scales into performance, and the performance data feeds back into actionable insights. Run that loop enough and a brand starts to build what Marco calls memory: its own brand DNA, a growing read on what works in-market for its particular aesthetic.
That's also the long game behind ads of one. Personalization at the individual level already feels normal in a few places (the airline email that greets you by mileage number when you open it), and the premise is finally spreading into channels where it used to be out of reach. The flywheel is how a brand gets there without losing its own voice along the way.
Video, Video, Video
Ask what's next and the answer arrives three times: video. Imagery and text have had their AI leaps. Video is the next one, and Marco frames it as a three-dimensional problem, weighing brand guidelines, authenticity, and the absence of hallucination all at once. It has to look right and stay on brand, which is the genuinely hard part. Expect a series of launches across the year.
The Ceiling of Belief
The best line of the interview belongs to a founder framework Marco picked up from a fellow founder. On conviction: you are the ceiling. If the founder believes ten, the team can believe nine. Believe 1,000 and the team can believe 999. "You've got to be the thermostat, not the thermometer," he said, and set the tone for everyone else.
He closed on the thing he thinks actually separates people in this industry, and it wasn't a technology. It was curiosity. Never believing you know everything, and finding the people worth learning from. Cannes, he pointed out, is one of the rare events where a marketer who went AI-native two years ago and one who started in the '80s can compare notes.
What a time to be alive, as he put it. Also a good time to have some conviction about where you're standing, while everything else keeps moving.
Catch the full conversation with Programmatic Pulse on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
