Cuyana CMO Max Lishansky on AI, Brand Growth, & What Actually Works in Modern Marketing

Liam:

Awesome. I’m excited for this one. Thanks for making the time and coming in early. You’ve had an incredible career across performance, brand growth, and modern marketing. Why don’t you start with a quick intro on who you are?

Max:

Thanks for having me. I’m currently the CMO at Cuyana, and I’ve been in marketing for about 20 years. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I always want conversations like this to be as high signal as possible. Growing up, I was weirdly fascinated by infomercials. Even as a kid, I was interested in the how and the why behind them. Before I even knew what marketing was, I was already drawn to how narratives were structured, how pacing worked, how testimonials worked, and how those ads persuaded people. Looking back, that was really my first exposure to marketing. My first few professional years were actually in finance, which gave me a strong quantitative and performance oriented foundation. That was around the financial crisis in 2008. In hindsight, it was a great place to start because it trained me to think in terms of numbers, measurement, and outcomes.

Liam:

Do you think that finance background still shapes how you think about marketing today?

Max:

Absolutely. There are a lot of similarities. Both finance and marketing can be very performance driven. In finance, you’re constantly quantifying outcomes. In marketing, it’s similar, except there is often no ceiling if you find a breakout lever. If you hit on the right channel or the right tactic, the upside can be enormous. That mindset was pivotal for me.

Liam:

Growth marketing is obviously something you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. How do you think about it today?

Max:

When I think about growth, I think in terms of power laws. Brands do not grow by making every channel a little bit better and then expecting that to compound into breakout growth. Usually, breakout growth comes from one or two outlier tactics, channels, or advantages. The job is to identify your edge and push hard on it. That’s what really drives growth today. And the hard part is that if you’re outside the brand, it’s almost impossible to know what actually drove the growth. People love to reverse engineer success and guess what worked, and in my experience they are wrong most of the time. They think it was one viral post or one obvious tactic, when usually the real driver is more nuanced and less visible.

Liam:

What are one or two practical things you’ve done to get more accurate about what’s actually working?

Max:

Attribution is messy. If you add up every tool, they all claim credit and suddenly the numbers are way larger than reality. So for years I’ve tried to triangulate across different platforms to get closer to the truth. If I had to pick one input I love most, it’s actually a simple survey — just asking customers “how did you first hear about us?” and letting them answer in their own words. That gives you signal you often can’t get anywhere else. You start seeing specific creators, unboxing videos, press mentions, publications, or organic references you were not actively tracking. Sometimes you realize a creator you barely noticed is quietly driving a lot of new customers. For higher price consumer brands especially, it is rarely as simple as click attribution. Customers are influenced by multiple touchpoints before they convert. That’s why survey data can be so useful.

Liam:

That’s interesting because it gets to the idea of hidden insights or “secrets” inside a business — the thing that is actually working is often not obvious from the outside. At Instant, one of the things we’ve been building internally is a way to analyze campaigns, correlate creative patterns with outcomes, and surface insights quickly so people across the company can actually use the data instead of waiting on an analyst. With all the changes happening in shopping and search, how do you think AI changes things for brands?

Max:

First, I love what you just described because one of the biggest advantages today is simply making insight more accessible inside the company. The more operators who can actually use the data, the better. On the AI side, what we’re seeing is that conversion rates from model recommendations can be significantly higher than traditional search traffic. And I think AI search will create even more separation between the best brands and everyone else. In traditional search, a customer might see a full page of options. In AI search, you may only get one or two recommendations. That means the winners can pull away even more than before.

Liam:

So how should brands think about getting recommended?

Max:

Right now, a lot of the fundamentals still look familiar. High quality backlinks. Strong press. Reputable publications. Sources that models trust — that could be Wikipedia, the New York Times, Wirecutter, the Wall Street Journal, or other highly regarded publications. It is also about formatting your information in a way that is easy for models to understand. Over time, brands will get more sophisticated about that. And then there is brand reputation — Reddit matters, reviews matter, addressing customer concerns matters. All of that becomes part of the broader information environment the models are learning from.

Liam:

Storytelling also feels like it matters more than ever right now. You’ve seen so many shifts over the years. As you look ahead, what changes and what stays the same?

Max:

I think omnichannel is more important than ever. A cohesive brand story and clear positioning have to come through across every channel. You cannot just wake up one day and invent a beautifully written, poetic story and expect it to work if it is not grounded in something real. Great positioning has to be rooted in what your brand is genuinely best at. The question is always: what are you actually the best in the world at, or what is the clearest reason a customer should choose you? Once you know that, it needs to show up consistently everywhere.

Liam:

Is there anything tactical you’re especially focused on right now?

Max:

I’m a big believer in allocating as much budget as possible toward high upside opportunities. You want room for opportunism. You want room for the bets that can actually produce power law returns.

Liam:

What is one thing you’ve done in the last couple of years where the team thought, “We’re not totally sure if this will work, but if it does, it could be huge”?

Max:

At Cuyana, one example has been our social presence. For a while, we were creating content that could live on multiple channels and then posting it everywhere. What we’ve learned is that channel native content is more important than ever. If you want real reach and real sharing behavior, you have to create for the channel itself. TikTok content has to feel native to TikTok. Instagram content has to feel native to Instagram. If a brand wants to win on those channels today, it needs a truly world class strategy there. The internet is increasingly video and entertainment.

Liam:

Any brands you think are doing that especially well?

Max:

Rhode is a great example. They have a real content engine. They’re producing consistently, partnering well, and doubling down on what works. They understand that modern brand building is also entertainment.

Liam:

Virality feels more important than ever, but it can also feel random from the outside. How do you actually build for it?

Max:

You create the conditions for it, even though you can’t fully script it. For example, we had a great moment with Martha Stewart. She posted while traveling and happened to feature one of our bags. That relationship had been in motion for a while, so when that moment happened, it was an amazing surprise. When you get one of those moments, you have to move fast — put it on social, email your customers, push it into PR. That is how you turn one moment into a flywheel. But the key point is that you cannot rely on those moments as a strategy by themselves. They are upside on top of the fundamentals.

Liam:

What about the things that haven’t worked?

Max:

Most things in marketing do not work. I’m a huge believer in test and learn. For example, over the last few months we’ve been trying to scale Google non brand aggressively. We’ve been able to get it to a certain point efficiently, but scaling it massively is still a challenge. That is normal. You test a lot, most things fail, and a few things matter disproportionately.

Liam:

What would you say is part of the DNA of a strong marketing organization today?

Max:

Two things. First, I think everything on the brand side should be mapped back to human psychology. Marketing is human psychology, and a lot of brands forget that. One of the frameworks I love most is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is one of the clearest ways to think about human motivation. If you understand where your product or brand sits in that hierarchy, you can build much more durable emotional relevance. The lower and more foundational the need, the more durable the connection tends to be. Second, teams need to stay very close to the work. The best leaders are still in it.

Liam:

How are you thinking about AI inside the marketing team? Is it mainly efficiency, or something bigger?

Max:

Right now, I think the realistic view is that AI is an efficiency multiplier and a strong partner. It can absolutely help teams move faster. We use generative tools a lot, and they have improved dramatically over the last year. But for brand led work, most of them are still not fully there yet. They are getting better fast, but we are not at the point where you can hand everything over and expect world class output across the board.

Liam:

There’s obviously a lot of noise around AGI right now.

Max:

Yes, and I think part of the issue is that people often use the term without really defining it. At some point, maybe AGI means you can give a system a goal and it can execute everything needed to get there without human intervention. Could we get there eventually? Probably. But that does not mean it is about to become the silver bullet people want it to be. A lot of CEOs want AI to be the answer to everything. I just don’t think that is the reality today.

Liam:

Do you think the pace of progress slows from here, or are we still early in the acceleration?

Max:

I think it keeps compounding, maybe even faster. Two years ago, it was still niche for a lot of people. Then suddenly everyone started using it. Now it is integrated into more platforms, more workflows, more teams, and more engineering stacks. That broad adoption, plus competition, is accelerating everything. The major platforms are moving. Startups are moving. Everyone is racing.

Liam:

At Instant, we rely a lot on Gemini for generation tasks. It has been especially useful for the kind of context length we need across things like subject lines, on site copy, email, and images. It really feels like the pace of change is intense. I honestly would not want to be the CEO of one of these companies right now.

Max:

Exactly. It’s exciting, but it is also incredibly high pressure.

Liam:

What do you think gets automated first over the next few years, and what stays more human?

Max:

If you look at a spectrum, the brands that will be able to automate the most are the more direct response, performance driven brands. Those brands already put out huge volumes of creative. They care more about hook volume, angles, and learning velocity than perfect polish on every single asset. In that environment, AI can be very powerful. You can already see some direct response brands testing hundreds of assets and feeding the algorithms exactly what those platforms want, which is more volume and more learning. Brand led businesses will move too, but they are going to care more about nuance, control, and quality. That part remains more human for longer. That said, even there, the tools have improved a lot over the last few months. It is pretty remarkable.

Liam:

Creative directors still want brand control, which makes sense.

Max:

Of course. And the tools are getting better at giving that control. But over time, I think a lot of teams will become more comfortable letting the systems learn from their brand voice, their imagery, and their style, then generate from there.

Liam:

What do you think is overhyped right now?

Max:

A lot of the AGI conversation is overhyped relative to what it is actually doing inside marketing teams today. And I also think fully generated image and video creation from scratch is still overhyped for production use. If you give the model a real photo and ask it to enhance, adapt, or evolve it, the results can be pretty strong. But pure from scratch generation is still not fully production ready in most cases. It is getting closer, maybe much closer than people realize, but I still think there is a gap.

Liam:

Customer acquisition is so competitive now. Retention feels more important than ever. How are you prioritizing email, WhatsApp, and retention overall?

Max:

Retention is a huge revenue source, obviously. But the most important variable is still the product itself. If customers genuinely love the product, retention becomes much easier. Great marketing cannot fully overcome a bad product, and a great product can carry a lot. That said, even with a great product, you still have to execute retention extremely well. It comes down to how you speak to the customer, how you nurture them after purchase, what information they need, and when they need it. The retention strategy should reflect the actual product and customer journey. In many ways, retention is one of the few areas in marketing where a large part of the playbook is already known. The real difference is in the execution. You have to do it meticulously, over and over, at a very high standard.

Liam:

And the remaining upside is more about innovation and personalization?

Max:

Exactly. The more innovative layer is how personalized you can make the experience in real time. If you can generate the right message, the right visual, and the right call to action for a specific customer automatically, that is powerful. That is where things start to get really interesting.

Liam:

Why do you think personalization matters so much now? For a long time, “personalization” mostly just meant using someone’s first name.

Max:

Because customers are smart. They can tell when something is fake personalization and when something is actually relevant. If all you do is insert a first name, most people understand exactly what happened. But if the message genuinely reflects their behavior, their context, or what they care about, that goes a long way. And visually rich emails tend to outperform plain text by a huge margin. The opportunity now is to make those visuals and messages much more relevant to the individual customer.

Liam:

It feels like marketing playbooks are changing fast. The core channels are still there, but the amount of experimentation available is much higher. How do you think AI changes experimentation?

Max:

Traditionally, experimentation is a backward looking process. You run the test, you collect some data, and then humans manually process it and extract a handful of learnings. AI can change that by helping teams process much more information, much faster, and surface more nuanced patterns than a person might catch on their own. That is where I think it becomes extremely valuable — not just producing assets, but helping teams learn more from what they are already doing.

Liam:

On the acquisition side, what kind of data setup are you using today?

Max:

We use a few core data sources. Like many brands, we also have a data warehouse. Historically, access to that kind of data was mostly limited to data science or analytics teams. But more teams want answers now, including marketers and creative teams, and there is rarely enough bandwidth for everyone. So part of the future is making that data much more self serve across the organization.

Liam:

That resonates a lot. We think a lot about making customer acquisition and KPI visibility more transparent internally. As you look ahead 12 months, what do you think brands need to get right?

Max:

They need to find their edge. It is noisier and more competitive than ever. New brands are everywhere. Every business needs to understand what its real edge is, then build a sharp, relatable hook around that and push it consistently across channels. But that edge has to be grounded in real customer insight — it cannot just be something the company says about itself internally. I’m a big believer in listening to customers, using their feedback, and speaking back to the market in the language customers actually use. That is where a lot of strong brand building comes from. And the leaders who will do this best are the ones who stay hands on. Things are moving too fast in marketing and AI for leaders to sit too far away from the work. If you stop rolling up your sleeves, you fall behind.

Liam:

I love that. I think listeners are going to get a lot out of this. You’ve had an incredible journey, and it is clear why you’ve been successful. The game keeps changing, and it’s exciting to hear how you’re thinking about where it’s all going next. Thanks so much for coming on.

Max:

Thanks for having me.

Breakout growth comes from power laws, not incremental improvement — find your one or two edges and push hard on them instead of trying to optimize every channel slightly

A simple “how did you hear about us?” survey often surfaces better acquisition insight than any attribution tool, especially for higher price brands where click attribution misses most of the story

AI will separate winners from everyone else in search — models only recommend one or two results, so brands that can’t get recommended will lose disproportionately more traffic than they did on a traditional search page

00:00 From Infomercials to Modern Marketing Leadership 04:31 Finding Outlier Growth Beyond Obvious Tactics 10:55 Democratizing Data and Ranking in LLM Search 15:28 Crafting Viral, Channel-Native Brand Stories 21:08 Human Psychology Meets AI Efficiency in Marketing 26:31 The Rapid Evolution of AI and Market Competition 29:28 Beyond AI Hype: Mastering Retention Marketing 37:15 Hyper-Personalization and AI-Driven Experimentation 42:41 Finding Your Brand’s Edge and Hands-On Leadership