Startup vs Big Brand: What Did Katya Kotlyar Learn Switching Sides?

Jonathan Mildenhall, former CMO of Airbnb, recently argued that your personal brand is your proof of concept — if you can't market yourself, you have no business marketing anyone else. Lynette and Shann don't fully agree, and they spend this episode working out why. They get into the real reasons people build a following (career resilience, testing your thinking, finding your tribe), the three barriers that actually stop people from posting, and what changes once you've built a personal brand you're not sure you still want.

Most marketing is still selling the SUV driver racing across open terrain, while the actual buyer is dodging potholes in Brooklyn. In this episode, Shann and Lynette dig into one of advertising's oldest questions: when does the fantasy work, and when does it backfire? They trace the line from menopause ads featuring 20-year-olds to period products using blue liquid, and argue that the answer has a lot to do with whether you're selling something that signals identity to others or something that just has to work. Plus: why one in two women still feel misunderstood by brands — despite a trillion dollars of advertising aimed at them.

Marvin Miranda — Global Head of Brand and Creative Strategy at Accenture Song — joins Shann and Lynette to ask a question the industry doesn't love sitting with: is there a bit of a white savior syndrome in our industry? They trace how Western agencies spread across Asia, what the knowledge transfer got right and what it calcified into, and why Asia's most consequential marketing evolutions (creator economy, super apps, live commerce) haven't translated into more Asian voices running things in the West. The conversation moves into messier territory too — the deprivation mindset that can pit minority groups against each other, who gets to define what "excellence" means, and whether the ad industry has built the cultural fluency it keeps saying it values.

Dali Adekunle — SVP Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi Health, Stella Adler conservatory graduate, and former director of patient relations at NYU Langone — joins Shann and Lynette to argue the case for storytelling over statistics. The conversation covers the griot tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, why twenty years of pharma advertising has barely changed its visual grammar, and years working in China can teach you about the limits of logic as a universal language.

Acting, screenwriting, gaming, dance, gardening, running a volunteer website nobody got paid for. Shann and Lynette swap notes on the side-of-desk obsessions and unlikely hobbies that turned out to matter more in their marketing careers than a lot of formal training ever did. The conversation covers what an acting exercise about holding a cup reveals about observation, why Lynette sees every campaign as a piece of choreography, and how managing people who don't report to you — and aren't getting paid — is some of the most useful management practice available. Also: a brief detour into squash season in Vermont, and why you should lock your car.

Katya Kotlyar has moved through this industry in ways most people don't from small to big agency, some freelance, co-founding a cross-border donation startup with her sister (raising $2 million), and eventually winding it down before coming back to brand and startup strategy—often both at once. In this episode, she joins Lynette and Lynette to work through what big-brand thinking actually survives contact with startup reality, and what has to go. They get into burn rate as a creative constraint, the case for 80% and shipping, why brand can outlast a pivot, and why every marketer should probably try building something at least once.

Is maxing just self-improvement with a rebrand — or something more sinister? Shann and Lynette unpack where the trend came from (hint: the manosphere), why the algorithm is partly to blame, and what it all means for brands trying to figure out which side to stand on. From jaw maxing to nona maxing to the very real possibility of couch maxing as an Olympic sport. Ok, maybe not that last one...

Can you work in marketing — a job literally built around driving demand — and honestly call yourself anti-capitalist? Shann and Lynette try to find out. They start with definitions: what capitalism actually is, where anti-capitalism begins, and what gets lost when people conflate the two. From there it gets messier: the degrowth debate, whether brands like Ursa Major offer a real alternative or just a nicer story about growth, whether market forces can actually push companies toward better behavior (China's EV shift makes a strange cameo), and what Rory Sutherland's NRA-at-Cannes provocation says about marketing's blind spots. No tidy resolution. But a clearer picture of where the real tension lives — and why marketers, of all people, might have more say in it than they admit.

We all want to matter. But in a world where the average person has 700 followers and every brand claims to be meaningful, what does significance actually look like — and can it scale? Shann and Lynette get personal about where they've genuinely felt it, some pushback on the idea that brands should chase it, and make a case for why going smaller might be one of the most powerful things you can do in your life.

Anthropic's latest report says 65% of marketing tasks are headed for AI replacement — making us the fifth most disrupted profession out of 800. Lynette came in hot with a confession: she literally built her own AI replacement in her last role at Ogilvy. Shann came in skeptical of the "AI won't replace you, someone using AI will" line — and called it, diplomatically, a bit of a myth.We get into why marketing's own love affair with mediocrity made it so easy to automate, the automotive company that replaced its entire research process with synthetic audiences (and why it was probably the right call), and why the real crisis isn't the jobs disappearing — it's the junior talent pipeline nobody's properly investing in.Plus: the one skill both of us think will matter more than any prompt engineering course. Hint: it involves knowing what you actually think.