Building Resonant Brands with AI | Joanna Lord
Welcome back to The Search Session podcast! I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and today I’ll be speaking with Joanna Lord, global brand leader. Joanna brings a clear, practical view on how AI is reshaping marketing orgs, strategy, and brand building, from productivity boosts to real growth levers.
These are the takeaways:
AI-native roles evolve with organizational maturity: shifting from AI as just a helper to specific people taking ownership of AI to drive decisions and deliver business impact.
Strategy over efficiency: go beyond “do more with less.” Use AI to rewire GTM, product, and marketing for faster, compounding growth.
Conversational personalization, end-to-end: consumers will expect seamless, tailored journeys. The solution? Centralize AI + Insights leadership to stream real-time cultural signals across teams and deliver on that bar.
Instant insight to execution: most teams sit on data while insights lag. Use AI prompts to steer ideas in real time—dial boldness, manage risk, and add cultural nuance.
Your lens—your unique POV—is a prompt: treat AI as a brainstorming partner—use prompts to go bolder or safer, add cultural nuance, and sharpen ideas for your brand values.
Brand isn’t just about awareness and reach: these are easy to buy, so the next edge is resonance: recall, depth, and alignment—and AI can help create and measure it.
There’s plenty more in the concession, so grab your headphones and join the conversation.
Video Chapters
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and welcome back to The Search Session! Today’s guest is someone I’ve literally been chasing for months—and she knows it! You can hear her laughing. She wasn’t avoiding me because she’s a bad person. She’s just incredibly busy. But the wait has been more than worth it, because you’re about to have your mind... well, I don’t want to say exploded, but yes—you’re going to be amazed by her. Many of you already know her. So, who is she?
According to her LinkedIn bio, she's a global brand leader, CMO, advisor, and builder of beautiful things. Previously, she worked for Spring Health, Skyscanner, ClassPass, and Reforge. And for many of us—especially if you’re an older-school SEO—you probably remember her from her time at Moz. Who is this person? It’s Joanna Lord. Hey Joanna, how are you doing?
Joanna Lord: I’m good, I’m good! So happy to be here, Gianluca. Glad we could finally make it work.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, sure, I’m happy to—and like I was saying, the wait was really worth it. I was resilient and resisted. And I mean, we’re also friends, so I totally understood when you said, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy, I’m sorry, blah blah blah.” As a friend, I follow you on Instagram too, so I know everything you’re dealing with.
Before we hit record, I was joking with her that she’s become a bit of a globetrotter lately, traveling all over the place! So, I won’t ask you the classic “How is SEO treating you?”—which is something I usually ask our guests—because obviously, you’re not an SEO.
Though maybe we can spend a minute talking about SEO in the broader context of branding, because that’s become a pretty hot topic, at least in the last 12 months or so.
But for now, keeping things more relevant to our conversation today—how’s all this AI frenziness treating you lately?
Joanna Lord: Oh my gosh, yes—that’s a great question. Like probably everyone listening, I’m just soaking it all in. I definitely consider myself a student of all things AI right now, and personally, I’m loving this season.
After so many years of moving in different directions with marketing, growth, and brand, this moment feels really rejuvenating. It’s such a massive shift—not just in what we’re going to do, but how we’re going to do it.
And so, I’m loving it. I know we’ll get into more of this in our conversation, but especially over the last couple of months, a lot of the projects I’ve been working on have centered around how AI is reshaping marketing—how it’s impacting our teams, and our strategies.
I think it’s been really fun because I get to talk to people who are further ahead on the curve and hear what they’re doing, and I also get to talk to some people who maybe are a little slower to the kick and help them out.
So yes, I’m loving it. It feels like the Wild West—but in a really good way. I find it all super energizing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool, cool—yes! So, obviously, here on The Search Session, we talk a lot about the impact AI is having—not just on search itself, but especially on the people performing search. It’s all about how AI is reshaping search behavior, which is definitely an interesting topic.
AI-Native Roles Across Startup Stages
Gianluca Fiorelli: And something you said that really stuck with me was this idea that we’re kind of living inside a canvas that’s being painted in real time. That really captures the moment we’re in.
But what I found especially interesting was one of your recent posts on LinkedIn, where you talked about how AI is reshaping marketing and brand teams. You mentioned that we’re starting to see the emergence of new, AI-native roles.
I’ll ask you a two-part question. Can you summarize what these AI-native roles actually are? And what existing roles or functions are they emerging from?
Joanna Lord: Yes, I love this, and I’m spending a lot of time on this. So I’ll share my thoughts, but Gianluca, I’d love to hear yours too, because I think everyone listening is seeing this play out in real time. I’ll approach it from two different angles.
I think, in general, there’s a lot of noise going on right now. A lot of people, candidly, are writing what they think is going to happen—but we’re still testing it out, right? In-house teams are trying things. I’m currently consulting, and I have a lot of different clients, and they’re all at different stages—what I’d call different steps in the progression of how AI is changing the structure of their teams and the roles on those teams. And to some degree, you almost have to look at it in two ways:
One is—how is it changing existing roles that have this kind of historical, legacy mandate? Like to your point—SEOs. How is AI changing their roles?
And then, to your other point—what I’m probably most interested in—is these new, net-new, completely AI-native roles. Roles that would never have existed if we hadn’t seen such a major shift in technology.
So, I’ll kind of go at it from two directions. I believe the AI-native roles a company has will depend quite a bit on what stage they’re at. So, like, I think you’ll find that early-stage—seed and Series A—will still see AI roles more as multipliers.
So, you might not see that many AI-native roles. It might just be that many of the existing roles are using AI as a way to be more effective, more productive—to do the job of twenty instead of the job of three.
I think at the mid-level—kind of Series B, Series C—regardless of your model, right? Whether you're B2B, B2C, or B2B2C I think you’ll start to see the emergence of AI-specific roles. And mostly analytics and insights, which I’ll talk a bit about.
And then I think you’re going to see these late-stage companies—and we already are—start to post these AI leadership roles to the point where there’s very likely going to be a Head of Marketing, AI, and Insights role. And I think that’ll become a very AI-native, very powerful lieutenant to a CMO.
And I went as far, in my LinkedIn post, to say—I anticipate, I deeply believe—that in the next couple of years, we’re going to see a kind of succession planning as a CMO.
In the past, my Head of Growth or my Head of Brand has always been my strongest candidate for succession. They tend to be well-rounded, have multi-channel exposure, and are great leaders across larger orgs. But I think we’re going to start seeing this Head of Marketing, AI, and Ops become the most likely successor to the CMOs. Which means—they’ll be the CMOs of the future.
We can go deeper on that if it's interesting, but yeah—I think we’re seeing a massive shift, especially in mid- and late-stage companies, toward AI-native roles.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I think the same. And one of the reasons I found your hypothesis about the future so interesting is because one of the problems we’ve always had as SEOs—as a community and as a niche industry—is figuring out who we’re supposed to be talking to. It’s always been a challenge to understand who our real stakeholders are and to whom we have to talk.
And I think the eruption of AI—the fact that it’s becoming so important not just for us in SEO, but also for Growth Managers, VP of Growth, and all the people you're describing—is finally creating a common ground. So in the future, we’ll probably have fewer problems when it comes to explaining why we need certain things to be done.
CRM-Powered SEO
Gianluca Fiorelli: But another thing I wanted to ask you—you mentioned earlier that you’re consulting with companies at different stages of implementing AI into their workflows. So here’s my question: What’s the most common misunderstanding you see companies having when it comes to integrating AI into their work cycle?
Joanna Lord: Yes, that’s a great question. I think the number one misunderstanding—and we’re almost coming out of this now—but for the last 12 months, the biggest one has been simply this idea that AI is an efficiency tool. That it’s only here to make me more productive.
And I think, by the way, we saw that reflected in a lot of the early AI transformation plans companies introduced—they were really focused on tools. I read a stat that said something like 80% of marketing leaders are planning to increase their investment in AI over the next 24 months. And we just assume that means tools.
And sure, a big part of it will be tools. Things like: how can I deliver more variations for performance marketing, design, and content? Sure. But I think the biggest misunderstanding is that it kind of stops there.
More importantly—and this is where you're seeing some companies gain a massive advantage—is that they’re starting to say: “Okay, outside of just using AI tools to do more with less, how can I actually leverage AI in my marketing strategy or in my product strategy—so that I can fundamentally grow faster?”
And that’s where things get really different. You’re not just thinking about using an AI tool to generate creative—you’re starting to think about rewriting the way you go to market. So that you can ship more quickly —but also more effectively. Or in more personalized ways.
Or like—maybe you’re rewriting it for predictive analytics on top of your lifecycle CRM. So you're doing true personalization at scale—not what most of us have done before, which is really just manually sequencing tests against cohorts.
So yeah, I just think that’s the misunderstanding: thinking of AI only as a productivity tool for marketers, and not stepping back to look at your entire strategy and asking, “If we could do everything faster and better, what would we actually do differently? And should we just change that now?” I think that’s the big shift.
And you’re starting to see this separation between companies. On one side, the ones introducing AI as just another tool. It’s taking them longer, and they’re not seeing the same upside. And on the other side, teams that are starting to think more AI-first, more AI-native.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I like that you mentioned personalization as an example, because as an SEO—and this applies just as much to people working in social media, email marketing, and other classic digital marketing channels—AI is becoming essential.
Let’s think about ChatGPT, Claude, all the LLMs, even Google. They’re all moving toward such a high level of personalization that AI is becoming a critical support tool for identifying those personalization opportunities, or through specific messaging, or other tactics.
Again, I’m reusing the word “canvas” because I think it fits perfectly. Search is becoming a canvas—you’ll need to create content, or more broadly, messages, that can connect to all the potential variations of your classic buyer persona.
And honestly? I’ve never really liked the concept of buyer personas. I’ve always found them too monolithic. A square without borders is impossible.
But when I think about personas, I usually imagine there are gray zones. So it's not just a buyer persona—there’s the sub-buyer persona, and then the sub-sub buyer persona! This is the taxonomy lover in me speaking.
And that’s why I really liked what you said about using AI as an enhancer to what we are doing. And not just to make it faster, but to make it better.
Joanna Lord: And I think, Gianluca, like off of that, I couldn’t agree more. Because we always talk about these big shifts in technology, and as marketers, we geek out about how it’s going to change the jobs. And yes—AI is blowing all of that up. But we often forget that it’s also going to fundamentally shift consumer behavior.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly.
Joanna Lord: I haven’t searched for anything that hasn’t been on—Claude, or something from one of their partner or competitor tools. And when I’m on it, everything is so dictated to me that it feels weird now to go somewhere else where they don’t know me. It’s almost like—it’s not just changing things, it’s raising the bar, as we say in marketing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s like a cognitive shift.
Joanna Lord: Exactly. I’m not going back. And, you know, we’ve always said—I think the stat is something like over 70% of consumers expect some sort of personalization in every interaction.
In 12 months, 90% of consumers will expect a fully integrated, seamless, historically conversational, personalized moment. And that’s going to happen in the next 12 months—just because the primary way they search or discover has become so fundamentally conversational, you know?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. When I think of it in terms of marketing channels, the need for integration between all channels is so necessary. Because, for instance, SEO—because of its own story—can help brand and product discover things that are popping up.
Joanna Lord: A hundred percent.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But an email marketer and the customer team, for instance, can feed SEO about the needs that are coming directly from potential leads, potential clients, existing clients, and so on—in order to reinforce the content strategy.
Then the content strategy can take these big ingredients and start making a soup—working with brand, and so on—for the personalized messaging and the super-personalized positioning of a brand.
So I think this is, maybe—in terms of operations, from our more hands-on side—the biggest change.
Joanna Lord: I agree—and, I mean, to your very first point there, like, we’re going to become more integrated to be successful. And I don’t know about you, but we’ve all been at this a long time. It’s really hard to integrate effectively—not just across marketing channels when they’re run in silos, but then to do that well with product as you think about activation, onboarding, retention, and win-back.
That’s one of the reasons why I think this AI-native—one of the key AI-native roles, if not the most significant—will be a kind of Head of Marketing, AI, and Insights. And I think it will be so powerful because we are actually going to, more than ever before, be able to explain what’s happening that’s culturally relevant, in real time. That gets into the resonance of what our consumers are thinking about—whether that’s a buyer or a consumer.
I think other teams will need us more than they’ve maybe needed us recently, because we’ll have that real-time insight coming in. And it’s like: how do we organize internally to make sure everyone is consuming those insights the way marketing will be—so we can do better content, better creative? I think that will become a really big advantage for some companies.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and I’m noticing myself, in my daily work, something about this kind of shift. For instance—a really simple, practical example: all my clients have their own CRM, usually Salesforce or similar. And as an SEO, I usually ask very precise questions at the beginning about the business, the persona, the messaging, and the positioning. But, sincerely, I was never so interested in digging into a CRM.
Now, I think one of the tools—and many SEOs don’t get this—that you have to use is: talk with the people managing the CRM, and ask them to teach you how to use it as an analytics tool. Because, honestly, Google still provides some data, but GPT and all the LLMs provide nothing.
Joanna Lord: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You just have to guess what’s happening, if what you’re doing is correct or not. And so the CRM—maybe—is going to be the goldmine for information, for informing things. And maybe this is, for me, one of the effects of the integration I was talking about before.
Joanna Lord: Yes.
Beyond Efficiency: AI as Marketing Strategy
Gianluca Fiorelli: But then you were also saying using AI not only to make our work more efficient and faster, and so on—but also, as I said before, to enhance our capabilities.
And I’m a geek, so when I think of AI, I’m not really thinking about GPT or AI Overviews. I’m thinking, for instance, of how a specific model of Gemini is helping medicine discover and create new molecules—or discover new ways to fight certain types of cancers. So that kind of use—that kind of mindset—should be implemented at a business level too, not only at a researcher level.
If you implement that state of mind, you can individuate and create more effective, faster, more impactful ways to create real impact—a real messaging for a brand. Don’t you think?
Joanna Lord: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, especially in the last year. I’ve written a lot about it. But I believe, fundamentally, the best companies, the most successful companies, have found a way to lead creatively. And, you know, I think people can hear that and be like, “Oh yeah, that’s so brand, it’s soft.”
And they immediately think design, or they think content. But what I’m really saying is: the best of every product idea, brand idea, community idea—it always comes from a really interesting insight that was probably wildly hard to uncover across really large data sets (if we’re being honest), or really small data sets that have a lot of complexity to them.
And then being able to take that and attach it to something culturally relevant, right? I call that the combination of the cultural zeitgeist. That’s what I mean when I get so excited about AI.
If you just take a traditional marketing org at any company any of us is working with—traditionally, you have all this data. It’s accessible—if you’re lucky and you know how to access it—if you’re lucky. And you kind of look at it, and you’re trying to come up with these really interesting ideas. And that should precede audience strategy, use-case strategy, channel strategy, economics, budgeting, hiring—precede it.
And normally, we just kind of— I think that’s an overlooked stage. It’s an under-leveraged stage. And it has only ever been as good as the—usually—the marketing leader in the seat, right? Like—what have they seen? And/or the leadership team more broadly.
But what AI unlocks is—to every idea—you can leverage it through prompts and say: “I want to be bolder. I want to be more conservative. I want to include this concept of cultural identity. I want to stay away from that social topic.”
And I really get excited when I think about how good all the other pieces will be when that first input is exceptional. And we couldn’t do it before AI—there was no way. I have 20 years of experience, but now I have unlimited years of experience. I have access to unlimited marketing-leader years of experience—chat agents being created by my peers. I have unlimited access to creativity.
So that’s where I probably stretch it a bit—and it freaks people out. But when you think about our jobs, they have always been downstream: make the most out of whatever was “up here.” And I’m like—yeah, we can go anywhere up here now, and it’s going to be the best ideas, if we invest in how that creativity is leveraged.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, the importance is the quality of the data you’re using for the model. Obviously, that is the biggest investment that must be done.
Joanna Lord: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And, well, in this sense, we are a little luckier sometimes, because obviously it’s limited, because it’s search. So we have, for instance—if we were smart and saved month over month, after month—always Google Search Console data, for instance, with queries and so on. We have tons, tons of data to use.
But what I like—I don’t know if you agree with me—is: even if it’s not consequential, because AI is very “start from this, go to this, go to this,” it’s great to brainstorm with AI. Premise: with a wonderful model behind. Interact with AI for brainstorming—but somehow being me, you know, the one who is always picking the “nose” of AI. And especially with lateral thinking, which is not consequential for an AI to do.
But, for instance, I’m starting to write something and I’m—because I’m passionate about mini painting, you know—and I was saying, using Gemini’s Deep Research, “Okay, let me try to see if this idea is stupid. So let me compare LLMs—the architecture of LLMs—with the techniques of painting miniatures.” And it came out as quite a good metaphor, so I’m probably going to use it for writing a post. This is a very simple example, but I think this is maybe the best way to use AI.
Because doing so—having demographic data, feedback data from customers, search data, social listening data, and so on—and focusing on the products that you have, maybe you come up with not only improvements to the same product, but even the creation of a new product that’s popping up—something people are demanding and nobody is offering.
Joanna Lord: Yes, I mean, I don’t want to take us too off track here, but since you’ll humor me for 30 seconds—what you’re describing, this idea of a dance partner for brainstorming…
It was somewhat lost in COVID, right? As we shifted to a lot of us working at home—kind of more general remote-working behaviors—even in a return-to-office environment, the dynamics are different. We’ve taken how we worked at home back into the office.
What we’re seeing with AI—and I think this is powerful—is that a lot of our critical-thinking skills over the last couple of years have atrophied, and we probably haven’t even noticed, because so much of that thinking happens through synapses firing in response to unexpected cues in our environment.
That’s why we always talk about the “water cooler.” It’s not the water cooler itself—it’s that we went there, heard something we didn’t know, and it made us think something we weren’t thinking.
I think some of that has been lost in the last couple of years. To leverage AI, like you’re saying, as a brainstorming partner is basically manufacturing that. However, the coolest part is—it’s a conversational agent. It also remembers the last 18 water-cooler ideas. And I think there will be so much we get from that.
I certainly use it as a prompt, like: “What am I not seeing? If you ‘know’ me, where do you think I should take this that I’m not taking it?” And it blows my mind every time, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. In fact, sometimes I have to—one of these weird kinds of conversations I have with AI—I have to do it in a temporary chat. Because if not, it’s going to stay in memory, and I don’t want it in the memory. It’s so weird, the things I’m asking in the brainstorming. Otherwise, I have to go to the settings later and clear the memory.
Joanna Lord: And we’re the audience that knows this, right? The SEO community understands search history. We understand algorithms.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Joanna Lord: It’s hard to rewrite them once they’re written.
From Reach to Resonance
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. And that’s why I want to come to brand. The importance of brand for SEO is that—we know, and you probably know from talking with your clients—that clicks are dropping. With LLMs and AI Overviews, those clicks to our websites aren’t coming anymore.
So visibility is becoming really important—maybe the most important metric for SEO. And the problem is: what kind of visibility, and why is visibility important? I always stress that visibility matters because your brand is always there—it’s creating a memory in the mind of the person you want to target.
And I think this is maybe the biggest relation—apart from all the technical stuff of knowledge graphs and structured data—where SEO can be helpful for branding. More for branding, for brand positioning in visibility and awareness.
Gianluca Fiorelli: However, we were talking a lot about AI, but you’re also saying another thing I’ve seen: contrary to what many people say and think, AI—if well used—may actually help us recover and rediscover the importance of a human touch. The importance of a one-to-one relationship in that sense, but also of human values put into a brand.
So, to make it stand out versus competitors—not just a proclamation of super high values (the classic “About Us,” “Our Mission”)—still valid, but somehow so high they’re basically in a galaxy far, far away)—but to make it closer to the reality of people.
Joanna Lord: Yes, I feel like I’ve said this a billion times, and I could say it a billion more. In my career, I’ve seen the pendulum swing a few times. The attention we’ve given to reach—and the size of our reach—is a beautiful thing because, you know, for a long time we only focused on outputs, right? And then we moved upstream and realized, “Oh, outputs are an output of inputs,” and often we’ve got to look more upstream.
And we thought a lot about reach. As a brand leader and someone who’s studied this for so long, I think we’ve come a long way. It used to be: you either care about growth or brand. Now we realize they’re intertwined—it’s a rising tide. It helps your downstream economics.
But I think the bigger challenge now is that when we think about brand, we just think about awareness. So, yet another learning curve for all of us. Because awareness—the idea of how big, how aware (aided, unaided), what is the general reach of your audience, how loud is the microphone, right? It is a very powerful thing. If you don’t care about it as a brand, you should. But that’s not enough, right? Reach is easy to buy, whereas resonance is hard to earn. And resonance is about recall. Resonance is about staying power, alignment, and depth.
And I think that’s where the next frontier will be—and that’s where AI will be wildly powerful.
You talk about values, and I certainly share this. Yes, it’s important that our consumers care. They will buy more from us, and we will be more successful, reciprocally, if they believe in our values, right? I think 77% of consumers, given the choice between two brands, will buy the brand that has more aligned values.
But I think, to your point, it’s not always about this deep relationship with our mission statement and our values. I will preach all day about the power of that and what it did for Patagonia—but there are plenty of ways to translate that down into less lofty, more tactical applications.
So I’ll use fast fashion as an example. There are a lot of fast fashion brands—take sustainability aside, which is a whole other problem—but they’re very successful even though they don’t have a deep, resonant relationship. And the reason they are is because their value is reliability. Like, buy this today, get it tomorrow, right? And to someday, Amazon Prime is that, right? Like, I don’t deeply align with Amazon’s maybe top value, but I love it when I buy something for my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and it’s here tomorrow morning by the time we wake up. And that’s the shared value, that’s the authenticity, and that’s the resonance they’ve built with me. And therefore, I will always say, “Yes, just go buy that on Amazon. You’ll get it tomorrow by four.”
So, to that point, I think it’s really critical right now that marketing leaders—irrelevant of the domain you lead—are thinking more about resonance, in addition to reach, than they ever have. Because this will become critical as consumer behavior shifts to AI. Because the number of touchpoints is one thing, the depth of how those touchpoints stick with us is far more important.
I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I think that’s where I am. I always push, and always will advocate, for a deeper look at resonance and recall—and investing in those tracking tools and making sure, as a company, you know how you’re tracking. Because reach is easier to get these days, but resonance is wildly hard. Harder than ever, actually.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, because that’s why—even if it’s a really old concept, the Purple Cow, by Seth Godin, is still more important than ever.
Joanna Lord: Yes, good reference.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And also because, coming to my field, resonance leads to memory. Memory leads to the visit, and the visit means memory—physical memory—in LLMs, in Google search history, and so even more amplification and visibility.
Joanna Lord: A hundred percent. It leads to more visits, yes. And it leads to more advocacy for net-new visits that you didn’t buy. And, like, you know, we’re in a more competitive market for any category than we’ve ever been—and we will be, now that more companies are getting built on top of AI every minute. I think the competition—the noise—will go up, and therefore there’s only one way to cut through the noise. It’s not just to be more of the noise; it’s to be a more recalled moment in the noise, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: And regarding this, I want to introduce maybe a variant in our conversation. There is usually this sort of— I don’t want to call it mainstream, but many people are saying: “Okay, in order to be visible, etc., etc., and because of how all these systems and models on which LLMs or AI search are made, we must target the consensus about something.”
The problem I have— I’m not saying I don’t agree at all, but I find it poor-minded. Because if I’m going for consensus about, let’s say, how to sell a sneaker, or how to talk about a travel destination—what makes my website, as a mirror of my brand, different from any other?
So sometimes what I really urge my clients—even going a little broader than my SEO role—is: why do we have to write, for instance, “the top 10 things to see in Rome,” and it’s always the same top 10 things everybody’s writing? Let’s do “the other top 10 things you can see in Rome.”
Joanna Lord: The hidden gems. You’re spot on. Everyone’s really worried about this mass access of like basically reproduction to the most common denominator. Sure. But also, we had that before, with teams of really cheap content writers. We’ve all had that same challenge and siren song that you can just mass-produce generic, common content.
And I think what we’ve seen time and time again is that differentiation is found in the lens you take. It just happens that now the lens is a prompt. It used to be a conversation in a room, or an email, or a Slack you had with someone on your team as you were making some strategic decision. Now it will be overlaid with prompts—and the more sophisticated we are in thinking through our brand’s values and what we uniquely believe to be true…
This is why, by the way, Gianluca—on a tangent—I think you’re going to see a whole slew of brands that forgot to build brand houses and messaging houses, and they’re going to be like, “Wait…” And they’re going to have a crisis: “What do we stand for?” Because it’s going to matter more than it did a year ago.
And they’re going to feel more sporadic. As consumers, we’re going to start to see brands that feel more sporadic—they’re going everywhere and anywhere because they can produce faster, but they don’t have a point of view. They skipped it. And that’s what I mean by that very first important step.
And I think, as SEOs and search marketers and just general digital marketers, our work will get better and tighter because more people will finally care about all the things we’ve told them they need to care about. And that’s just the reality—it’s not optional.
AI is Merging Creators with Brand Strategy
Gianluca Fiorelli: Now, regarding this—somehow connected, actually very connected—you also talk a lot about how the creator economy is not new. It’s already been a few years since it has existed and thrived. And I’m actually a real big consumer—again, going back to my hobby. All the people I follow are content creators on YouTube, Twitch, or Instagram.
Joanna Lord: We’re in this all day, Gianluca. I’m here for it. Let’s do it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So you’re really stressing that collaboration—because somehow the content that creators (let’s call them creators) and brands produce has, at least from what I’ve seen—until now, moved on parallel paths. Very rarely do they converge.
I’ve only seen a few cases. One I saw very recently. I think it’s The Verge, starting to use their own journalists as content creators for messaging the news. And by doing so, they’re growing subscriptions—which is fantastic.
In my field, for instance, Games Workshop is using painters as their own faces for content creation on the YouTube channel or wherever.
And I think you’re really spot on in highlighting the importance of merging paths with content creators. First, they’re usually the ones who really know everything—they may even know your product better than your product team. And secondly, because they have their own base of superfans about your product.
So creating a genuine—not just money-based—collaboration (obviously there’s an economic part), but making it a truly felt collaboration, I think, is going to be very important for resonance, memory, and so on.
Joanna Lord: I couldn’t agree more. I’m going to butcher this reference because I wasn’t prepared for it, but Sephora just launched this last week—or this week—where they’re basically getting rid of referral links and they’re just going to build for creators. So now, creators will have Sephora storefronts. And it’s like, I love this.
You know, five years ago, Sephora looked at it and said, “We need to control this. We are the storefront. They can post on their channels to their audiences and use our referral links and get paid.” Fast forward five years, and they’re like, “We can’t control this. Why are we controlling this? We’re actually hurting ourselves by controlling this.”
They are now going to have storefronts that creators host, curate, and create—as I understand it—and it’s like: “I won’t shop Sephora anymore. I’ll shop these five women’s or men’s Sephoras that I follow. That makes more sense to me. And it’s what I’ve been trying to do anyway.”
So, I think that’s an example that’s obviously a very easy-to-understand application. —because it’s D2C, it’s beauty. But if you think about it, the creator economy is going to be like $460 billion by the end of 2027. And we have so much proof that brands that market through creators get higher engagement and make more revenue—four to six times engagement on any one impression, moment, or opportunity if it’s through a creator versus a known channel.
And so I think you’re spot on that it will converge. I’m super interested to see what convergence will mean for different business models. I can wrap my head more easily—as I’m sure all of us can—on D2C in particular categories. But what will it mean for B2B? You know, we’re starting to see this world where top leadership at B2B companies is becoming creators in their own right, and they’re getting entire teams behind them to create that. And, okay, interesting—well then, who takes that kind of currency with them when they go? It’s theirs.
So I think there will be a lot to see in how it shakes out for B2B and B2B2C to some degrees—because how do you flow through B2B? But regardless, what we are seeing is that if you can leverage creators in your distribution strategy—not as a channel, but a platform—you will. It’s where we’re going. I think it will just look a little different based on your category and your model, you know?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally. And I think that you—what we were saying before—surrounding the fact that there is this fandom that is creating content with your products that you cannot control. It reminds me—again, my nerd nature coming out—of when Star Wars was trying to stop fans from creating “Legends.” And now we see they’ve started to move things into canon that were created as Legends by fan writers, and so on.
And I think there is maybe the most difficult part because you have to maintain the identity of a brand, so you don’t have the fandom—and the creators included in the fandom—deviating from the position you have for the brand.
Before you were talking about B2B—here it's more about how to identify this creator. Maybe this creator is your customer. The customer who’s always talking to your customer team—that is a creator in potential.
There are very specific subreddits about the most absurd B2B things, where you can find who the most interesting people are writing in that subreddit. So, I’m even making a proposal; he’s going to be happy to work with you.
Joanna Lord: Well, and I couldn’t agree more—sorry, I got really excited there—because honestly, Gianluca, as a brand marketer, this is like the fifth time this has happened where I’ve had to redefine what my ownership of “brand” meant. And remember—you and I were there, in the trenches, the same years—when all of a sudden I had to give up ownership of how the brand was represented in the SERPs.
And then, all of a sudden, I had to give up brand when affiliate became a massive channel. I had to give them rein on a lot of things. I still had guardrails in place—but most of them were ignored.
Same with brand partnerships. I remember when I was at ClassPass, brand partnerships were the new and interesting way. I had some guardrails, but ultimately the brand I was partnering with—like Nike, for example—had the final say. They decided how I was shown, how the content was distributed, and how the collaboration was discussed. So this feels like just another moment where I have to give up the reins.
And I do think—without sidetracking us too much—this is where I believe another AI-native role will emerge: someone focused specifically on AI partnerships. It won’t just be partnerships with vendors and compliance, but they’ll be thinking about how it will relate to the ecosystem of creators or amplifiers on top of our brand—what they're able to pull from our datasets, and not to use for their own success.
So again, this is just another example of how, as brand leaders, we constantly have to adapt to the new distribution opportunities.
Measurement and Consent-First Personalization
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally. And let’s say we’ve done all this—rolled out the new strategy, we’re implementing it. I’m saying this as an SEO, but I think it applies to everyone in the broader marketing team. AI is giving us a real headache when it comes to metrics and measurement.
Joanna Lord: Yes, a hundred percent.
Gianluca Fiorelli: How are you dealing with this sort of Sudoku?
Joanna Lord: Yes, I don’t yet have a super well-articulated answer on where this is all going. But here’s some general guidance I’ve been thinking about. Especially because what we’re really talking about is a consent and data privacy challenge, right? Particularly in the context of how marketers are applying AI and how we’re using it to better personalize.
And I don’t think this is that different from the frontier we’ve already been navigating. Personalization only works if consent is respected and valued. So, to me, I don’t look at it that differently outside of companies that are building not just data privacy, but are actually treating data as an asset they're actively collecting. Like “Where are all the places we can collect data?” If you’re still in that mindset as a company, this is going to run away on you.
But if instead, you’re looking end to end—and I mean truly end to end—from the very first impression when someone finds you, maybe they just join your community, get added to your CRM, or are captured in your ERP, they become part of your database—all the way through to when they’re activated in some way, whether they buy or not, and into onboarding.
If you're looking at every step and asking, “What’s the value exchange for data consent here? And how much are we willing to truly let people bow out?”—only then will the data you collect actually work in your favor. Because I think you’ll find that kind of privilege will be granted to you by consumers—and only then will you be able to leverage it in the powerful ways we’ve been talking about for the last 40 minutes.
So yes, I’m nervous about what all of this means for measurement—sure. But I’m more worried that marketers aren’t going to shift how they think about preference centers, or end-to-end consent. Or even internally—philosophically—how they approach consent at all.
And I’m more nervous that those conversations aren’t happening. Because if they don’t, I think you’re going to see some companies get left behind in a really big way.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, in fact, that concern about doing things better—I feel it too, especially as a European, because here in Europe, privacy is felt as a much bigger issue. The whole question of personalization and the limit of privacy—it’s a big deal. For instance, here in Europe, we now have the AI Act. It's already in motion, though it still needs to be implemented state by state. Let’s see what is going to be. A sort of GDPR for AI. And it’s going to be really interesting to see what that means for brands, for states, and all the challenges GDPR brought with it. So well…
Joanna Lord: We covered a lot.
The Fireside Questionnaire
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, let’s talk about you as a person.
I’ve always thought of you as a wonderfully creative person. But sometimes, maybe just maybe, a bit too much of a perfectionist—which, I felt, came through even when we were preparing for this episode. And I say this because I recognize it in myself, too.
Sometimes I procrastinate because I’m never quite satisfied with what I’ve done. So I wonder—how do you deal with that part of your personality? That inner push for perfection that maybe makes it harder to just deliver the work?
Joanna Lord: Yes, I’m a very loud and honest person—I’m super Type A. And by the way, that's not always everyone’s favorite trait, right? I’ve definitely had my fair share of challenges in my career because of it. Either I’ve been too much of a perfectionist, or—more commonly—the feedback I’ve gotten, especially earlier in my leadership career, was that I just had such a high bar.
My old boss at SEOMoz, Jamie, pulled me aside—it was one of the most important conversations of my career. I don’t even know if he knows that. He brought me into a room and said, “Your bar for yourself shouldn't be everyone else’s bar. Stop projecting.” And I was like—yeah, that makes sense.
I feel really lucky for how I was raised. I have two very hardworking parents, and I’ve done a lot of therapy, Gianluca. I deeply believe that I’ve been on a journey to do great things as a way of thanking them for the sacrifices they made. But what I’ve realized over the years is—I can’t let that drive become an obstacle. It can’t get in the way of moving fast, or of taking smart risks.
And that’s just a constant battle for me. I think I’ve gotten better as I’ve gotten older—because as you mature, you start to get a little wiser?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Not always true.
Joanna Lord: Maybe not, maybe not. But I do think becoming a mom—while it may sound cliché—has been a great journey for me because you have to relinquish control. There’s no sense of perfection anymore. My entire house is covered in pictures and handprints—it’s not perfect. I’ve had to let go more than I ever have.
So I think it's all about balance. And I also think it’s really powerful to know your natural predisposition. I’ve tried to use mine for good, right? I work fast, I work efficiently, and I organize my day around the hours I know I’m most productive.
I think it’s a balance of your superpower. Mine is at Type A perfectionism. Kind of using ot for good but not letting it become a hindrance.
Gianluca Fiorelli: An obstacle, yes. Now, this might sound like a silly question, but I think it’s not—it might lead to a more profound answer than one would expect. So, you’re now living in super sunny, super hot Florida. But you’ve always described yourself—publicly—as a Vermont girl. So, how does a Vermont girl live in Florida? I mean… what do you miss about Vermont?
Joanna Lord: It’s funny, Gianluca—because I remember, thanks to you, I was lucky enough to visit Valencia. And I remember absolutely loving it. It felt almost tropical—the oranges, the trees, the sun, the water. I think I didn’t even realize I was searching for that feeling until I found where I live now, which happens to be Boca Raton, Florida. I kind of tried to manufacture that vibe in the U.S.—and I finally found it here.
I feel very grounded here. Like, I’m looking out my window right now and I feel a sense of peace. It’s a lot quieter. I’ve lived in so many cities—New York, London, Seattle, LA—and I loved the race. I really did. But like you mentioned earlier, when I’m in a race, I run very hard.
And I’ve come to realize that the Vermonter in me wants to calm down—wants to downshift.
For years—being really honest—I saw downshifting as a kind of failure. Now, I see it as a powerful tool. It’s how I recharge, how I refocus.
So, to your question—what do I miss about Vermont? Ironically, I think I’m actually getting more of it in Boca than I ever did in the other places I lived. That’s why we love it so much. And Vermont, for me, was never really about the mountains—even though I love them. I never skied or snowboarded—I’m horribly uncoordinated, it's honestly embarrassing to watch!
But Vermont, to me, was always about this feeling: every time I go back, I take the deepest breath I’ve taken all year. And I found that in travel, which is why I love to travel. And I find that here. So they’re much closer than they are further apart for me in that way.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. And that’s something I’ve really learned with age: it’s totally fine to have those so-called “boring” moments—when you’re not doing anything. Or when you’re just doing something simple that you really enjoy. Maybe it’s reading. Maybe it’s watching a TV series.
Maybe it’s going out with your daughter. Or maybe it’s eating something you shouldn’t eat.
But also—like you were saying earlier—in those moments when you’re not thinking of anything, at the end of the day, besides recharging, you have the best ideas. Because they are so free to come out without any compelling “I have to do this, I have to do that.” It’s like when you fixate on something—it never happens..
Joanna Lord: We were meant to think—that’s the fundamental difference between us and most other things. And yet, as humans, we’ve filled our time so much that we’ve left ourselves no space just to let thoughts fly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: We have a phrase for that—it’s “Dolce far niente”, which is “the sweetness of doing nothing.” Literally.
Joanna Lord: The act of doing nothing—I know! And by the way, I really think this is so important. To bring it all back—this will be more important than ever as AI and this wave of technological shifts continue. Because one thing is for certain: we’re going to be consuming more than ever before, for the rest of our lives—exponential production.
So I think people who can find a way to truly enjoy the act of doing nothing—and who can protect their creative genius from all the noise—will actually become incredibly powerful.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I totally agree. So thank you, Joanna. It was a real pleasure to finally have you here on The Search Session—and also, personally, to see you again after so many years.
Let’s see if, on one of your many travels, you end up on this side of the world and can make a detour to Valencia so we can meet again. Or maybe I’ll make it to your side!
Joanna Lord: Come on over! This was so wonderful, Gianluca. And thank you—because you bring so much intention and thoughtfulness to where the industry is going. These are the right questions, and I’m glad you’re the one asking them.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Thank you. And now I’ll let you go—and let me go say goodbye to our audience and do the fun creator part.
So, to everyone watching: remember to ring the bell to get notified about the next episode of The Search Session. And of course, subscribe on YouTube—or Spotify if you’re listening there. Thank you again. Bye-bye!
Joanna Lord: Bye, all!
Key Questions Answered in This Episode
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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