Thought Leadership
Most early-stage companies steer clear of large enterprise brands. The stakes are higher, the needs are complex, and the cycles are slower. So when Joe Zawadzki, founder of the industry's first demand-side platform, and Corey Ferengul sat down with Marco Matos on a recent episode of The Aperiam Podcast, they put the obvious question to him: why run toward the thing everyone else runs from?
Marco reached for a line from A League of Their Own: "It's the hard that makes it great, but it's also the hard that makes it worth it." That sentiment ran through the whole conversation.
Running Toward the Hard
The iconic brands worth building for are the ones with the most at stake: companies thinking about durability, about transformation, about reshaping how they operate.
Adora is built for organizations that already have marketing operations, a creative team, a brand team, and a roster of third parties. The complexity that scares others off is exactly the surface area Adora is designed for.
In the podcast, Marco doesn't pretend it's the easy road. "I will fully admit it's way harder to do it this way," he said, but those companies have the most to gain.
Same User, Different Rooms
Adora's view of the channel landscape was built from the inside. Across the major platforms, brands are reaching roughly the same user in a different room, each with its own algorithm, formats, and audience behavior, so the content that wins in one room falls flat in the next. Most marketers can see this and still can't act on it, because no team can hand-tune the specificity every platform demands. For instance, Dentsu’s Creative CMO Report found that 76% of CMOs have the data to tailor their creatives but can't produce the volume of assets they need. Rather, it’s easier to concentrate budgets on one or two platforms.
Adora's premise is to let organizations scale across channels — with optimized creatives for each — without scaling the headcount or expertise to match, creating the opportunity to drive performance through data-driven budget allocations.
The Brand Is the Bar
Brand fidelity is where the real test lives. The concern marketers raise most often is that creative produced at volume will drift off-brand, and a recent Dentsu report puts a number on it: 65% of CMOs say capturing their brand's tone, look, and feel is the standard the technology still has to meet. That instinct is the right one to have.
Adora treats brand consistency as the thing that makes scale worth doing in the first place. Scale only pays when every asset looks unmistakably like the brand that made it, and getting that right is what turns volume into an advantage. No matter how content is made, the brand always sets the bar for what excellence looks like.
The Iron Man Suit
For all the talk of automation, Marco drew a sharp line on where the machines stop. "We are not the AI marketer in the box," he said. "We're very much the Iron Man suit."
Systems are excellent at the mechanical stuff: formats, resolutions, the aspect ratios that quietly eat a team's week. Humans are the ones who tell the story, define authenticity, and turn performance data into economic value.
The market agrees on the division of labor. In the Dentsu report, 86% of CMOs said the technology should give talented people superpowers, not replace them. At Adora, we’ve seen our partners revel as the platform lets them focus more on what they love — creativity and strategy — and streamline the rest.
Ad for One
Adora takes its name from Ora, serving as the latin nominative for face, and the founding idea behind it was the ad for one. Marco sees that promise extending past media into a full 360 customer experience: social, email, in-store, even a return handled as a genuinely good moment, all personalized and transparent to the person on the other side.
Consider retailer Brooks recognizing that a long-time runner is due for a new model suited to their stride, in a colorway they'd actually want. He's candid that this is the promise the industry has sold for years without delivering. But he sees the pavement being laid in real time, and the brands that get there first, honestly and in the open, will be the ones customers thank.
From Complexity to Change
The throughline of the conversation was clear: complexity is where the opportunity starts. The brands with the most moving parts, the most channels, the most data, and the most teams are the ones with the most to gain once those pieces finally work in concert.
That is the shift Adora is built for, turning the weight of a large marketing operation into forward motion. The market moves too fast to wait for the org chart to catch up, and the brands that treat their complexity as a head start are the ones that will set the pace of what comes next.
Listen
The full conversation is on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
