Videos
AI Powers Marketing's Growth Engine at Optimum
Insights
- Marketing earns its seat at the table by owning revenue outcomes, not just brand awareness — a case Optimum made structurally by merging marketing and e-commerce under one leader.
- AI-generated creative can replace costly one-off production (like bespoke shoots across 50+ school markets) without losing the personal, localized feel customers expect.
- As search shifts from Google to AI chat platforms, discoverability now hinges on consistent brand messaging across every channel and partner — conflicting information risks getting flagged as unreliable by the models themselves.
How does a marketing team turn itself into a growth engine, and what role does AI play in that shift?
Jinx Joglekar, Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum, discusses how AI is helping his team move faster on creative, personalize the buying journey, and stay visible as search shifts from Google to AI chat.
Jinx highlights three critical shifts:
- Merging marketing and e-commerce lets a CMO make the case that marketing drives revenue.
- AI-generated creative, like a spokesdog campaign and customized university assets, cuts production costs without feeling artificial.
- Consistent brand messaging across every partner now determines whether AI chat platforms treat a brand as reliable.
Jinx explains that Optimum's marketing organization now owns both media and conversion, a structure he built to prove marketing drives revenue. He argues that AI's real value is speed and personalization at scale, from generating customized creative for more than 50 school markets to producing AI-driven campaigns, like a spokesdog ad, that audiences engaged with as fun and genuine rather than flagging as AI-made. Jinx also points to a shift in discoverability: as customers start searches in AI chat platforms instead of Google, he tracks Optimum's visibility with an LLM optimizer and insists on a consistent brand narrative across every partner, since conflicting information gets flagged as unreliable by the models. He describes persisting ad signals through the customer journey so a website can reskin itself for a shopper by the second or third click, rather than routing everyone to the same static landing page. He closes on what excites him most: AI removing manual busywork so marketers can spend more time on the creative and strategic work that drew them to the profession in the first place, or, in his words, "the fun stuff." This conversation gives marketing leaders a candid look at how structure, creative speed, and discoverability come together to make AI a genuine growth lever for marketing teams.
This interview was recorded at Cannes Lions 2026 as part of a partnership between Infosys Aster and the Association of National Advertisers. Click to learn more about the ANA and the Global CMO Growth Council.
Skyler Mattson:
Good afternoon from the gorgeous south of France, where I think we're actually getting a little bit of cloud cover. For just a minute.
Jinx Joglekar:
It is a little cooler now.
Skyler Mattson:
To relax us from this heat.
Skyler Mattson:
We are at Cannes Lions 2026, and we're speaking with leaders driving innovation with AI in marketing. I am so happy to be joined by Jinx Joglekar, CMO of Optimum.
Jinx Joglekar:
Perfect.
Skyler Mattson:
That was the hardest part of the interview.
Jinx Joglekar:
So now it's all easy.
Skyler Mattson:
Now we're just going to sit back and enjoy. Okay. CMO of Optimum. I'm sure your role encompasses a lot, but give us a breakdown of what your key areas of focus are now.
Jinx Joglekar:
Yeah. So I'll just give you a breakdown of the team and kind of what we're looking at. So when I joined Optimum, because of my background, which I ran e-commerce at Comcast, I've done digital product. When I went to Sling TV, I also executed the switches, bringing the marketing function and the e-commerce function, the digital function together.
Skyler Mattson:
Okay.
Jinx Joglekar:
Because I'm a firm believer, I was actually just on a panel yesterday where we were talking about, yes, you're going to own the media spend and the consideration set, but also own the conversion funnel.
Skyler Mattson:
So that way, when you have a conversation with your CEO, we're not a cost center, we're a growth engine, right?
Jinx Joglekar:
Yes. And so I brought them together. So my real areas of focus are, my theme is really creative, brand, lifecycle marketing, customer intelligence, e-commerce, and martech. Those are my leadership theme. And of course, media. And so those are sort of the big areas of focus for me. One, how do we have really great breakthrough creative at a volume enough to meet the algorithm?
Skyler Mattson:
I've been hearing from SEO to GEO.
Jinx Joglekar:
Yeah, oh yeah. Which is a whole new world. It's a whole new world and creative is the new targeting. Let's get a lot of creative, let's put it into market, and we'll see what works and what resonates is actually what's going to resonate versus, hey, let's really segment an audience and do that. So debatable if that's right, but anyway, we're about making breakthrough creative. We're also about figuring out how to really have highly targeted media that drives a higher ROI. So we're looking really at value versus volume. If that makes sense. And then, the third thing is e-commerce, like I said, conversion funnel optimization, AEO, GEO. We can get into any of that if you want. And really how we drive that. And then the last piece is really, how do we think about our martech stack? And then how does our martech stack enable one-to-one, as close as we can get, personalized comms to our customers? In telco, if you've talked to any other telco leaders, the old world was, I don't want to talk to my customer, because then they might churn. They might look at their bill.
Skyler Mattson:
Oh my gosh.
Jinx Joglekar:
No, we have the best pricing in the industry. We want people to engage with us, but if we're going to do that, we have to understand who they are, understand where they are in the customer journey, have that data, and then use that as we speak to them. And speak to them, quite frankly, in the right channel. Whether it's in the app, whether it's email, whether it's SMS. We need to orchestrate that. It starts with really setting up a great martech foundation and then activating off of it.
Skyler Mattson:
How are you using AI to give you that volume that you need to get that message out there?
Jinx Joglekar:
I am so glad you asked that. We are really using AI to amplify all of our production. Shout-out to my internal creative services team. We had one in other places I've worked, I won't say where, but I've never seen a team that has so embraced AI and said, this is not taking our jobs. This is making our jobs better. And you see it in the creative we produce. So for example, we have university campaigns. That's a big moment for us. Kids moving off campus, coming back to school. We're able to customize those assets for each school without a massive production cost, without a massive timeline, without going and having bespoke shoots at every school. It's fantastic, and when you have over 50 schools in your footprint, that's big.
Skyler Mattson:
Wow. That's a big thing.
Jinx Joglekar:
So on that personalization, but even on our, for lack of better term, our more mass campaigns. For those watching the Knicks game. Go Knicks!
Skyler Mattson:
Go Knicks. I'm a Sixers fan so.... Although I will say Jalen Brunson likes my Eagles, so we're on the same team. Been to Villanova, so we're going to align.
Jinx Joglekar:
But anyway, if you watch some of those Knicks games in New York, in particular, we had a really fun ad that we put out. We have this spokesdog, Gus, that's working really well. We thought, what's better than a spokesdog? Let's not do a person, let's do a dog, right? But we were actually able to get him in really fun elements on the beach, doing really fun kind of summer things, all driven by AI. And the reception was super positive. Not like, oh, this is an AI ad. Just like, oh, this is fun, engaging creative. And that's where you really want to go with AI, you don't want people to be like, ugh, AI. You want it to be fun and engaging. So all the way then to, we do live shoots, but we might do it here, right? And you actually want the background to be maybe a field.
Skyler Mattson:
AI.
Jinx Joglekar:
You do AI, and that's actually the most natural way we've found, but if you want to do something that feels natural and still have the human element, we found that's really great. And that allows us to, again, cut times of shoots, cut costs, because we don't have to be at the French Riviera if we want to be, right?
Skyler Mattson:
Fortunately.
Jinx Joglekar:
I mean, I'd love to, and we are, so that helps. So we use AI across the board.
Skyler Mattson:
Awesome. Really helps our game. Awesome. I love that you are hitting on some key themes around personalization and context because we've moved past volume. Yes, AI can get us speed and scale, great. But it can also get us better, more engaging content because we can be personalized, because we have the budget to do so now, which is great. Let's talk about e-commerce now.
Jinx Joglekar:
Of course.
Skyler Mattson:
How do you use what you know about this customer from these sort of high-level brand campaigns to target them more specifically when they get to the site, and they might be closer down that purchase funnel to making a purchase?
Jinx Joglekar:
Yes, I have a philosophy that great advertising, great marketing is great creative, like we just talked about, great media like high-impact media, no little banners, we're talking good stuff and the great digital experience that encompasses that all. And the only way that you do that is to have the three legs of the stool. But the last piece is so important because you really have to understand the signals of your advertising and then bring that into your e-commerce. So for example, if we're targeting a mover, because that's a big moment for us as a telco, then when they come to the website, I want them to see mover creative.
Skyler Mattson:
That's right. We've already acknowledged them, right? Keep connecting the narrative through.
Jinx Joglekar:
Exactly. And the old-school way, and I've lived through this, would be, oh, we're going to make a landing page. But who goes to the landing page?
Skyler Mattson:
You know. Your viewers know. They know.
Jinx Joglekar:
They just go to optimum.com. So we need to pick up that signal and actually persist it through the journey. “Aha, you're a mover likely.” So now we're going to skin that merchandising as a mover. And by the way, if you go to, as you navigate around the site, that journey persists with you. And so we did that really effectively at Sling for our different segments of viewership. So we're bringing that over to Optimum, and we're already starting to see the benefits of conversion, because we know if you persist that journey, you're going to engage the customer more, you're going to find what they want. We have a goal, it's a goal, so I'm not there yet, okay, but by the second or third click through the site, we should know enough about you to kind of reskin the site.
Skyler Mattson:
Wow. For you.
Jinx Joglekar:
So like one-to-one, because you might be a mover, maybe we should have movers in the navigation. Or you might be interested in certain content on TV. We should have that in the navigation. And that's really how you're going to funnel the customer through your funnel, get them through your site, but also combat, which might be another question you have, combat the thing that we have today, which is a lot of people aren't going to the sites because they're in ChatGPT or whatever. You have to create a great experience on your site and drive them from these other experiences to there. So they want to actually engage.
Skyler Mattson:
Yeah. Okay, let's talk about Chat for a second. So I'm not going to Google anymore. We're going to Chat. That's where we're starting our search. How are you making sure Optimum is showing up?
Jinx Joglekar:
First of all, we have a platform where we're able to see what people are searching, how people are engaging with conversations of our brand and our competitor's brand.
Skyler Mattson:
Okay. Is this a proprietary platform, or?
Jinx Joglekar:
No, we are actually using Adobe's LLM optimizer.
Skyler Mattson:
Okay.
Jinx Joglekar:
But the reason why we like it is because we're able to actually look at this view. We're also able, from a technology perspective, to deploy any tech SEO, tech GEO optimizations to the Edge. The Edge is just their content delivery network, allows quicker speed, basically, for the layman, upload and readability for the engines. And so first is monitor, and then it's understand where you're not doing well, and then it's kind of the old-school SEO thing where we're making sure our website updates, we're making sure we have the right content there. I tell my brand team all the time, and this is just important for a marketer, you really have to understand the full scope of marketing because I tell my brand team all the time, I'm like, it's not good enough to make cool creative. You guys are the stewards of the brand. You need to make sure that narrative is consistent. Because, even with our indirect partners, because if somebody is conversing with ChatGPT and there's conflicting information, ChatGPT will say, “Nah, unreliable.”
Skyler Mattson:
That's right.
Jinx Joglekar:
And then they'll prioritize something else. It has to be consistent.
Skyler Mattson:
Has to be.
Jinx Joglekar:
So, yeah, so we do that. And then the new thing, or ish, is really focus on some areas that were maybe underutilized in SEO, for lack of a better term. But right now the LLMs are really into it.
Skyler Mattson:
We'll see if that stays.
Jinx Joglekar:
But like things like YouTube, things like the metadata on YouTube, things like Reddit. Where we maybe weren't playing in that space before. You have to right now.
Skyler Mattson:
I just want to comment on this. It's been a few years since I've had the lovely privilege to be at Cannes. And this shift for creators, and the fact that Reddit is on the beach, and the fact that I say influencers, but I think creators is the appropriate thing to say, that there is so much power in their hands because it's a third-party endorsement. And I think the way you're saying it, the brand isn't this precious thing that the marketers only hold onto. The whole world is your brand.
Jinx Joglekar:
It is. Which is wild.
Skyler Mattson:
Yeah.
Jinx Joglekar:
I mean, and unchecked, it goes nuts, right? It can be the Wild West out there. And so we have done a concerted effort to engage creators, influencers. They're part of our marketing plan. They're part of the portfolio. They're part of our media buys. And when I talk to the team about that all the time, we will never get the traction if they sit on an island because we won't give them the investment they need. And honestly, just think about yourself, that's how you're consuming, right? We talk about it all the time. You're scrolling past the ads, but if somebody that you like and enjoy and makes great content is repping something, you're like, “Oh, that's kind of interesting.” And then maybe see an ad and say, “Yeah, I'll click Optimum. Yeah, let me see more about them.” Right? And that's the way we want to funnel them. I encourage all the people listening and watching to try it themselves. So like I created a podcast, it's called “The Art of Commerce.” We talk about this, so it's really fun. But I also get to learn about how to create and how the algorithm prioritizes me or doesn't or whatever. And so that makes me a better client-side marketer because I get back, I'm like, okay, I know enough to be dangerous now. Versus sometimes as marketers in the old world, we might sit in the ivory tower because, oh, I don't know about television production, or whatever. Now it's all for us. So like I encourage everyone like use AI, use Claude, use OpenAI, like figure it out. Use it, make yourself better with it. But also create. Create. Even if five people watch it, it doesn't matter. You learn a lot. Create in any form, whether it be a podcast or you're building agents to help you get through your life.
Skyler Mattson:
That's right. A woman from Salesforce today said, “Get your hands on the keyboard and use Claude Code.”
Jinx Joglekar:
Oh, love it. Every leader, and this is a very senior group, every leader needs to learn how to code.
Skyler Mattson:
Right.
Jinx Joglekar:
And I think that being hands-on, it drives adoption for your entire team. We are so accustomed sometimes in the client-side environment and corporate environment to sit in the ivory tower. Can't do that anymore. The world is changing too fast. It will pass you by if you sit up there. You've got to be on the ground. You've got to be using the tools.
Skyler Mattson:
What are you most inspired by in terms of what AI can help you and your teams do?
Jinx Joglekar:
I am really inspired by the fact that, like, and I know, and I want to acknowledge it's a tough time for certain people because they're worried about their jobs, and that's not unfounded. It's not an unreasonable thing to be worried. But I would say the core skill set of a marketer has never changed. We just now have a new tool. You have to be curious. You have to understand the end-to-end journey. You have to work, collaborate with people. You have to communicate. Somebody asked me what the biggest thing is for marketers is creativity, collaboration, communication, right? It doesn't change.
Skyler Mattson:
Right.
Jinx Joglekar:
Now you have another tool in your tool belt called AI.
Skyler Mattson:
Yep.
Jinx Joglekar:
And it can help you. It can actually make those three Cs or whatever even better.
Skyler Mattson:
Yeah.
Jinx Joglekar:
And so the long-winded way of saying is, the way I think about the thing that makes me excited about AI is we can focus as marketers on the fun stuff again.
Skyler Mattson:
Yeah. Right?
Jinx Joglekar:
I don't need to have a team that's making Excel spreadsheets to give to whoever, direct mail provider. AI can help us with that, and then we can start thinking of the fun stuff. What's the creative?
Skyler Mattson:
Yep.
Jinx Joglekar:
How do we engage our customers? How do we keep our customers?
Skyler Mattson:
Yeah.
Jinx Joglekar:
Right? All the fun stuff.
Skyler Mattson:
Yeah. Right? That we talked about at the beginning.
Jinx Joglekar:
And other than talking about AI tooling, we really didn't talk about AI other than how it enables us. And that's really what excites me. As marketers, let's focus on the fun stuff. Use the tools, get your hands dirty so that it'll enable you to be really great at your job, and so that'll give you the opportunity to focus.
Skyler Mattson:
Amazing. Jinx, I have enjoyed this so much. I promised, though, that I would get you out of here, so we must end.
Jinx Joglekar:
Well, thank you so much. I'm going to get back in the AC, but this was wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Skyler Mattson:
Thanks, Jinx.
