The audience for a marketing campaign has historically been understood to consist of human beings — people who might be persuaded by an arresting image, a memorable phrase or the ineffable sense that a brand understands them. This is changing, and not in a way that anyone who entered the profession before 2020 could have anticipated.
Dara Treseder, the chief marketing officer of Autodesk, the design software company, finds herself in a peculiar position four years into the job. When she arrived, artificial intelligence was, as she puts it, "a footnote in the plan." Today it is the pivot point for the entire company, which means that Ms. Treseder must now market not only to the architects and engineers who use Autodesk's products but also to the large language models and AI agents that increasingly recommend and even purchase software on their behalf.
Her response is a philosophy she calls "facts and feelings."
"The agent is just following the facts," Ms. Treseder said in an interview. "It's not necessarily following the feeling that a human might."
This creates what amounts to a bifurcated mandate: structure a brand so that machines can correctly interpret it while continuing to produce the emotional work that makes humans care. (One imagines the creative brief for such an assignment would be bracing.)
The emotional side of that equation is about to become visible in Autodesk's largest brand campaign of the year, created with Giant Spoon, the agency, and featuring the sort of imagery — a newborn baby, an inspiring narrator — designed to stir something other than an algorithm. The campaign will run throughout the N.F.L. season, building toward the Super Bowl, and positions Autodesk not as a technology hero but as a supporting player to the 300 million people who design and make things.
"We wanted to use our 60 seconds differently," Ms. Treseder said, "to focus on the people who make that future possible."
That philosophy extends to what she described as the most significant brand partnership in Autodesk's history: serving as the official design and make platform for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games and Team USA. The company's technology will help retrofit more than 40 venues for the Games, which plan to use no new permanent structures — a sustainability story that practically writes itself.
Ms. Treseder summarized the approach with a metaphor that perhaps only a marketer would reach for: "They're Taylor Swift. We're the publicists."
Original story published in The Drum: "‘Facts and feelings’: Dara Treseder’s AI marketing playbook for Autodesk | The Drum"