Brainlabs’ Chief Planning and Data Officer Andrew Littlewood on why brands are fighting to get mentioned inside AI answers, and what that means for creative advertising going forward.
Here’s a stat that stopped me for a second: 87% of marketers were using generative AI in at least one recurring workflow as of Q1 this year, according to Salesforce research. Not “aware of it.” Not “testing it.” Using it, in production, every week. That’s the number Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer at Brainlabs, opened with when he joined Deconstructing Data, and it set the tone for the whole conversation: AI hasn’t nudged creative advertising forward, it’s rewired it.
Littlewood runs strategy, planning, and data at Brainlabs in North America, which puts him at the intersection of two things that used to live in separate departments, creative judgment and data science. That vantage point is exactly why this conversation was worth having, because he’s not talking theory. He’s talking about what’s already shipping.
What does “data-driven creative advertising” actually mean right now?
For Littlewood, it’s less about AI making one part of the job faster and more about AI touching every part of it at once, content production, audience targeting, media optimization, all pulling from the same expanding well of data. Brainlabs has gone all in on this shift, calling itself an AI-first company and re-engineering its processes around that mindset.
But the acceleration isn’t just about output volume. It’s about what humans are freed up to focus on instead.
“The critical thing for people in our industry going forward will be judgment, and critical thinking, and the ability to evaluate what’s happening in all of those automated workflows.”
— Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer, Brainlabs
That’s the trade Littlewood sees happening across the industry: less time on execution, more time on deciding whether the execution is actually right.
Why are brands suddenly fighting over “citations” instead of rankings?
This is the part of the conversation that should reframe how every marketing team thinks about search. Littlewood pointed out that consumer search behavior has fundamentally changed, people aren’t typing keywords anymore, they’re typing paragraphs.
“We used to type in search terms, and now we’re typing in paragraphs, you know, short life stories in some cases, into the search bar to get a response… It might have taken me two or three months to research something before. Now it will take me five prompts.”
— Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer, Brainlabs
That shift has created a new currency: mentions and citations inside LLM responses. Getting cited (your website actually linked in an AI answer) is a different game than getting mentioned, and both are different from the old SEO playbook entirely.
“That’s obviously an intense battleground now, and actually a very volatile one if you look at it. You know, typically search had become quite predictable… but now if you look in the LLM environment, there are lots and lots of different brands mentioned, cited, not necessarily the big ones. Usually the ones who are structuring their content in the right way to be drawn in by the engines.”
— Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer, Brainlabs
That volatility cuts both ways. It’s a real threat to brands that built their advantage on paid search budgets, and a real opening for smaller ones. Littlewood’s read: challenger brands no longer need massive ad spend to compete, they need to be smart about structuring content so LLMs pick them up. Call it an “organic media mix,” seeding your brand in places like Reddit and Medium so you eventually surface in AI answers instead of just paid placements.
What does data-driven creativity actually look like in a live campaign?
Littlewood came loaded with examples, and they’re worth sitting with because they show how far past “chatbot writes your ad copy” this has already gone. His favorite: PODS, the storage and moving company, built a campaign called the World’s Smartest Billboards.
“They basically took all of the trucks and storage containers they had, they put digital billboards on the side, and then they used AI to basically stream localized messages… it’s 76 degrees in Brooklyn, why don’t you head to Brooklyn Bridge Park?”
— Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer, Brainlabs
Then there’s Heinz, which took a different but equally sharp approach, using AI’s own pattern recognition as proof of brand strength.
“I liked what Heinz did, where they used AI image generators and typed in various prompts associated with ketchup to basically prove that the shape of their label and bottle was the most common output from an LLM.”
— Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer, Brainlabs
Coca-Cola’s “Masterpiece” campaign, built heavily on AI-generated content, was one of the earlier and more visible bets in this direction. The common thread across all three: brands leaning into what AI already associates with them, rather than fighting to control every pixel.
Can you test a campaign before it exists?
This is where the conversation turned toward where things are headed, and it’s the most useful section for anyone planning next year’s budget. Synthetic audiences, AI-built profiles that stand in for real consumer panels, are already being used to sense-check creative before it goes live.
“Synthetic audiences are a fantastic way to fill gaps that we couldn’t fill before… you can build a synthetic profile of your customer using your data or with other data sources, and then you can iteratively understand what their preferences might be.”
— Andrew Littlewood, Chief Planning and Data Officer, Brainlabs
Littlewood believes full campaign simulation isn’t far off, running a campaign entirely inside an AI environment against synthetic audiences before a single dollar hits a real platform. I’ll go a step further with my own prediction here: I can see a trade desk, Google, or Meta building an actual sandbox into their ad platforms, where you upload a campaign, get performance metrics back, tweak it, and only then take it live. Once that becomes native to the platforms themselves, testing stops being a research phase and becomes a button you press before every launch.
The bigger picture
What struck me most about this conversation wasn’t any single tool or campaign, it was how consistently Littlewood came back to judgment as the actual differentiator. Automation is handling more of the mechanical work: content generation, targeting, even first-draft strategy. What’s left for humans is the harder job, deciding whether any of it is actually right, and building the answer-first content strategy that gets a brand cited instead of ignored.
That’s the shift every marketing team should be planning around right now. Not “how do we use AI more,” but “where does human judgment still need to sit in this workflow,” because that’s exactly where the value is moving.
Want to connect with Andrew Littlewood? Find him on LinkedIn (search “Andrew Littlewood”) or check out Brainlabs.
Ready to bring that same data-driven precision to your own campaigns? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
Watch the full episode: Data, AI, and the Future of Creative Advertising
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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