MediaMint EVP of Marketing Services Ilan Nass’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on Brandformance, AI Growth & Performance Marketing
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🕧 23 min
In an exclusive interview with MarTech Pulse, Ilan Nass, EVP of Marketing Services at MediaMint, shares insights on AI-driven brandformance, GEO, and scaling performance marketing.
Your journey from co-founding Taktical Digital to contributing to MediaMint’s global growth story reflects a deep understanding of performance marketing. Could you share how your career evolved in the digital marketing ecosystem and what experiences shaped your perspective as a growth leader?
I started Taktical Digital about 12 years ago from a desk in my mother’s apartment. No funding, no investors, just a laptop and a belief that performance marketing was going to eat the world. Before that, I was in growth roles at companies like BarkBox, MoviePass, and Fueled, where I got to see firsthand what happens when you pair strong creative instincts with real data discipline. Those experiences taught me something that still drives everything I do: great marketing isn’t about picking between brand and performance. It’s about making them work together.
Building Taktical from zero to over 100 people serving 70+ global clients gave me a very specific education. You learn fast when you’re the one signing the checks and the one on the phone with the client. Every mistake costs you directly. That pressure forced me to think about marketing the way a CFO would, not just the way a CMO would. What’s the real contribution margin? What’s the actual incrementality of this campaign? Those are the questions I kept coming back to.
When MediaMint acquired Taktical in late 2025, it wasn’t a typical agency acquisition. It was a bet on combining Taktical’s strategic and creative horsepower with MediaMint’s global operational infrastructure and AI capabilities. The transition gave us something most agencies can’t offer: the ability to deliver enterprise-grade execution at scale, backed by 2,800+ people globally, without losing the strategic intimacy that made Taktical successful in the first place.
Now that Taktical Digital operates within the MediaMint ecosystem, how are you currently contributing to the company’s broader vision of delivering AI-enabled marketing operations and performance-driven growth for global brands?
My role is to take what we built at Taktical, which is a very hands-on, strategist-led performance marketing model, and layer it on top of MediaMint’s global delivery engine. MediaMint already powers marketing operations for some of the biggest platforms in the world, including Pinterest, Disney+/Hulu, and Microsoft. What Taktical brings to that equation is direct client-facing strategy, creative production through our Studio T arm, and deep expertise in emerging channels like Generative Engine Optimization.
Practically, that means I’m focused on a few things. First, building out our go-to-market for what we call “brandformance,” which is our approach to unifying brand storytelling with measurable performance outcomes. Second, expanding our GEO and SEO practice to help brands navigate the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery. And third, making sure that as we scale, every client still feels like they have a dedicated team that genuinely understands their business. That last part is non-negotiable for me.
MediaMint has positioned itself at the intersection of marketing operations, automation, and AI-driven execution. From your vantage point, how is AI changing the way marketing teams manage campaigns, optimize performance, and scale operations?
AI is doing two things at once right now. It’s compressing the time it takes to execute, and it’s expanding the surface area of what’s possible. Tasks that used to take a media buyer half a day, like building out audience segments, writing ad copy variations, or pulling performance reports, can now happen in minutes. That’s real and meaningful.
But here’s where I think most of the industry gets it wrong: they treat AI like it’s a replacement for people. It’s not. It’s an amplifier. The teams that are winning right now are the ones using AI to eliminate the low-value, repetitive work so their people can spend more time on the stuff that actually moves the needle: strategy, creative judgment, and client relationships.
At MediaMint, we’ve built an agentic AI platform called MiA that’s designed around this principle. It doesn’t replace the human in the loop. It makes the human in the loop significantly more productive. We’ve seen 40% quality improvements in accounts where agentic solutions are deployed, and that’s not because the AI is smarter than the person. It’s because the person now has time to actually think.
Performance marketing has expanded far beyond traditional PPC and SEO. What major shifts are you currently seeing in how brands approach performance-driven growth, particularly with increasing pressure to show measurable ROI?
The biggest shift I’m seeing is the collapse of the old funnel model. Brands used to think about awareness, consideration, and conversion as separate stages with separate budgets and separate teams. That’s breaking down. Today, a single TikTok video can drive awareness and conversion simultaneously. A Reddit thread about your brand can show up as a citation in ChatGPT and influence purchase decisions you’ll never see in your attribution dashboard.
That’s why we talk about “brandformance” at Taktical. The line between brand and performance is gone. The brands that are growing fastest right now are the ones that understand this and build their teams and measurement accordingly.
The other major shift is what I’d call the rise of AI-driven discovery. We’re seeing a whole new channel emerge where people are making purchase decisions based on what ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews recommend. Forum posts about your brand now have more authority than your own website in some of these AI search results. That’s a fundamental change. We’ve been pioneering a discipline called Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, to help brands show up in these AI generated answers. For one client, Benjamin Moore, we drove a 762% increase in LLM-referred sessions. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a new channel.
Many organizations today struggle with fragmented MarTech stacks and disconnected data. What practical steps should marketing leaders take to ensure their technology ecosystem actually supports better decision-making rather than adding complexity?
I’ll be honest, most companies I talk to have way too many tools doing way too little. They bought a CDP, an attribution platform, a creative management tool, three different analytics dashboards, and none of them are actually connected in a way that helps anyone make a faster or better decision.
My advice is always the same: start with the question, not the tool. What decision are you trying to make faster or more accurately? Work backwards from there. If the answer is “I need to know which creative is driving the most incremental revenue,” then you need clean creative tagging, a solid attribution methodology, and someone who knows how to interpret the data. You probably don’t need another platform.
The other thing I’d say is: don’t underestimate the value of people who can actually operate your stack. The gap I see most often isn’t a technology gap. It’s an operations gap. You can have the best tools in the world, but if nobody knows how to use them properly or connect them together, you’re just paying for expensive shelf-ware. That’s actually one of the core things MediaMint solves. We provide the operational talent and process layer that makes your existing technology actually work.
With automation and AI taking a larger role in marketing execution, where do you see the greatest value of human expertise today, especially in strategy, creativity, and customer engagement?
Creative strategy. Full stop. AI can generate a thousand ad variations in an afternoon, but it can’t tell you which story is going to resonate with a first-time mom versus a college student versus a CFO evaluating your product. That intuition, the ability to understand context, emotion, and timing, is still fundamentally human.
I also think human expertise is critical in what I’d call “strategic pattern recognition.” An experienced marketer can look at a campaign that’s technically hitting its ROAS targets and still say, “Something’s off here. We’re cannibalizing organic. We’re over-indexing on retargeting. The incrementality isn’t real.” AI can surface the data, but it takes a human to ask the uncomfortable questions about what the data actually means.
And then there’s client relationships. Nobody wants to get their marketing strategy from a chatbot. They want to talk to someone who understands their business, their competitive landscape, and their internal politics. That human layer is what keeps clients retained for years, not months. It’s why we’ve always invested heavily in client success at Taktical, and it’s a model we’re scaling across the broader MediaMint ecosystem.
Looking ahead, which emerging trends in MarTech, whether AI agents, predictive analytics, or next-generation marketing platforms, do you believe will most significantly reshape digital growth strategies over the next few years?
Three things keep me up at night, in a good way.
First, agentic AI. Not chatbots. Not copilots. Actual AI agents that can execute multi-step workflows autonomously, things like monitoring campaign performance, flagging anomalies, adjusting bids, and generating reports without a human initiating each step. We’re already building this at MediaMint through MiA, and the productivity gains are real. This is going to reshape how agencies and in-house teams are staffed within the next two to three years.
Second, Generative Engine Optimization. I know I keep coming back to this, but I genuinely believe GEO is going to be as important as SEO was in the early 2000s. The way people discover brands is changing. AI-powered search is eating into traditional search traffic, and the brands that figure out how to show up in AI-generated answers early are going to have a massive compounding advantage. We’re already seeing it with our clients.
Third, the convergence of creative and data. The next generation of marketing platforms won’t just tell you what’s working. They’ll dynamically generate and test creative in real time based on performance signals. The creative team and the media team are going to become the same team, and the tools they use will reflect that. Studio T, our creative production arm, is already built around this idea of feeding creative decisions with performance data and producing at scale.
Finally, many of our readers are marketing leaders navigating rapid digital transformation. What strategic advice would you give to organizations looking to build a resilient and future-ready marketing operation?
Invest in your people before you invest in your tools. I know that sounds counterintuitive for a MarTech publication, but it’s the truth. The organizations that thrive through transformation are the ones with adaptable, curious people who can learn new systems quickly, not the ones with the biggest tech budgets.
Second, stop treating marketing as a cost center. If your marketing team can’t clearly articulate its contribution to revenue and margin, that’s not a measurement problem. That’s a strategy problem. Get your unit economics right before you scale your ad spend. I’ve watched too many brands burn through millions because they scaled campaigns that looked great on a ROAS dashboard but were actually destroying margin.
Third, stay curious about new channels but disciplined about where you spend. GEO, AI search, Reddit as a discovery platform, these are all real opportunities. But they’re not opportunities for everyone right now. Be honest about where your audience actually is today and build a roadmap to where they’re going.
And finally, find partners who tell you the truth, not what you want to hear. The best agency relationships I’ve seen, and the ones we try to build at Taktical, are the ones where the agency pushes back. Where they say, “Hey, your gross margin isn’t strong enough to support this spend level,” or “This creative isn’t going to work and here’s why.” That’s the kind of relationship that actually creates long-term value.
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About Ilan NassAbout MediaMint
Ilan Nass is Executive Vice President and Head of Digital Marketing at MediaMint, where he oversees digital marketing services and supports the development and execution of client campaigns. He works across key areas including content and creative production at scale, dedicated client-aligned team models, and evolving approaches to search and AI-driven marketing, while also helping shape how the company presents its work through campaigns, case studies, and measurable results. Ilan brings more than a decade of experience in digital marketing and growth strategy. He is the founder of Taktical Digital, a performance marketing agency acquired by MediaMint, where he helped build a data-driven organization focused on paid media, SEO, content, and lifecycle marketing. His work has supported brands including Benjamin Moore, Discovery and WeWork. IIn his previous roles, Ilan has also served as the Director of Growth at BARK and Interim Chief Marketing Officer at MoviePass.
MediaMint delivers AI-driven revenue operations solutions that redefine growth strategies across media, marketing, sales, customer success, and beyond. Since 2010, we’ve turned operational complexity into a competitive advantage, helping businesses achieve scalable, sustainable growth. From MediaMint Labs’ advanced AI capabilities to customized operations support, we partner with clients globally to unlock efficiency, elevate performance, and drive value creation.
