Marketing is undergoing one of its biggest transformations yet. According to Pierre Robinet, the future belongs to brands that move beyond capturing attention and focus on understanding consumer intent.
As AI, creators, and new digital platforms reshape how value is exchanged, leaders must rethink traditional marketing models and adopt more adaptive, intent-driven approaches.
A seasoned expert in brand transformation, digital innovation, and AI-enabled growth, Pierre brings nearly 25 years of global experience across Europe and Asia. He has supported organisations through various customer behaviours; new technologies and massive business change over the years.
In an interaction with CEO Insights Asia Magazine, Pierre speaks of the new marketing, from AI-led systems to creator economies and collaborative storytelling wherever there is a consumer market, and how organizations can balance innovation and structure where practically every sector is being disrupted.
Read the complete article below for deeper insights.
From traditional marketing to AI-powered ecosystems, how has your personal definition of meaningful brand engagement evolved over the years?
I’ve seen a fundamental shift from attention to intention. For years, meaningful engagement was about capturing attention, brands with the biggest budgets interrupted audiences with broad, demographic-driven messaging. That model is fading. Today, engagement is no longer forced; it’s invited. Power has shifted to consumers, who use technology to seek exactly what they need, when they need it.
Marketing is shifting from capturing attention to understanding intent. Brands can no longer rely on broad messaging; they must earn relevance by responding to real consumer needs, building trust, and adapting to AI-powered ecosystems that increasingly influence decision-making.
This is not an evolution for me, this is a complete reorganisation. The old model was a brand-led monologue. The new model is a dialogue where the brand’s role is simply to be the most relevant, trusted answer to a consumer’s declared intent. We are not delivering static personas anymore; we are responding to dynamic prompts. This intention economy is mediated more and more by AI agents, which act as personal gatekeepers for every consumer action.This represents how brands show up: by earning relevance within these new systems for connectivity in order to reach their future consumers.
Across your global journey, what’s the most surprising consumer behavior shift that challenged your assumptions and reshaped your marketing outlook?
We have been trained, for years, to see consumers as “buyers” at the end of a linear marketing funnel and influencers just as an additional efficient media channel to reach them. However, we now realize many brands have miscounted the size and influence of the creator economy. Today’s creators are managing an entire ecosystem. They cultivate communities, they control distribution channels, they create premium content and even function as end-points for sales on platform like TikTok.
This collapse of roles is what’s profound: the customer has become the channel, the community, and the storefront, all in one. This change has a degree of fundamentalism that disrupts traditional marketing models. This has given rise to a new form of currency: content. If consumers are the new channel, their engagement is a monetizable asset
This is why I believe in 'Creator Loyalty' programs that don't just reward purchases but reward the act of creation and influence. It is channeling and rewarding for the proactive role played by consumers while creating long-term brand equity.
Was there a defining experience that changed how you see the role of storytelling in driving real business impact today?
I don’t see this as a passing moment. It’s a fundamental shift. In the past, the model was closed. We moved from cross-media storytelling to more sophisticated, multi-channel narratives, what we once called transmedia storytelling, where stories unfolded across TV, digital, and mobile in coordinated ways.
But today I feel that we are moving forward to a certain form of open-source storytelling. The analogy is intentional. Rather than a finished, tightly controlled narrative I believe brands now need to give away the source code, an amazing story seed, core of some human tension or even simply an action platform. The story is then released, intentionally designed to be adopted, remixed, and amplified by creators and culture.
Instead of amplifying a brand story, creators are storytelling partners who help the brand co-create new chapters with them. This is something I have witnessed in campaigns like Vaseline Verified where thousands of creators brought the BRAND story to life. The result is the creation of a narrative multiverse, a constantly growing and changing ecosystem of Brand’s stories.
With deep experience in M&A and P&L management, how do you balance innovation ambitions with financial discipline in complex organizations?
I often say we need to run two clocks, not one. The fundamental challenge I see in our industry is managing these parallel timelines. On one hand, there’s the “now” business clock, focused on quarterly performance, efficiency, and delivery. That’s the immediate reality of how businesses operate. On the other hand, there’s the “next” business clock, which measures our readiness for the market of tomorrow. What used to evolve annually now shifts almost every quarter, as clients continuously assess our ability to drive transformation and embrace innovation.
When I create new services or co-design solutions with clients, I know they must be built on a strong, structured core offering to scale effectively. That’s why I believe in establishing clear strategies and centers of excellence, which act as hubs of expertise. But these must operate with a dual mandate: standardize and scale the core, while simultaneously incubating innovation.
For me, it’s about protecting and evolving core services while continuously adapting to new and unmet client needs. Financially, this means ensuring innovation is self-funded and non-negotiable, never at the expense of the core, but always reinforcing and advancing it.
Working with Fortune 500 clients across industries, what emerging trends in AI-driven marketing do you believe leaders must prepare for now?
I believe the next major chapter is the rise of agentic AI, which will profoundly transform and disrupt how businesses operate, and ultimately how marketing function will evolve. I see a future where autonomous systems act as agents on behalf of both consumers and organizations. For consumers, this means highly personalized agents managing daily decisions, filtering noise, understanding preferences deeply, and even executing purchases. This shift fundamentally disrupts the traditional marketing value chain, pushing us toward a new agent-to-agent marketing and economy.
Leaders must rethink their entire marketing function through this lens, both in terms of Brand equity and business impact to design new consumer relationship powered by intelligent agents.
For me, this isn’t a distant concept; it’s something I’m actively driving every single day with our team in APAC. With strong backing from WPP, we are deeply invested in AI and agentic transformation and our WPP Open, one of the most advanced marketing AI platforms in the industries, empowers any of our experts to drive this transformation across all our services
It has become our operating system for this new era. Through it, our teams are already deploying thousands of specialized agents across media, commerce, creative, and production, far beyond simple chatbots, these agents collaborate and interact intelligently. By integrating client and partner’s data, we are already building the agency of the future: data-fueled, AI-led, and built for continuous transformation.
Pierre’s 5 Powerful Takeaways on Marketing Transformation Today
- Marketing is Moving from Attention to Intention
Brands succeed by understanding consumer intent, not simply capturing attention. - Consumers Are Becoming Powerful Brand Ecosystems
Consumers now create content, build communities, influence purchases, and sales. - Storytelling Is Becoming More Collaborative
Brands grow faster when creators actively shape and expand narratives. - Innovation Must Balance Growth and Discipline
Successful innovation strengthens core business while enabling future growth. - AI Will Redefine Marketing and Customer Relationships
Agentic AI will transform engagement, decision-making, and marketing operations.
LAST WORD: Advice for Leaders Navigating Constant Disruption and Market Change
I would offer three key pieces of advice. First, I believe in mastering strategic patience. Disruption is constant, but transformation must be deliberate. I’ve seen leaders confuse the speed of technology with their organization’s ability to evolve; leading to “pilot purgatory”, experiments that never scale because they aren’t tied to core business problems.
Second, start with the outcome. Transformation must begin with a clear vision of the value you will create for your customers. For me, any transformation begins with a clear vision of value, friction to eliminate, and markets to create: technology must follow.
Third, stay relentlessly curious. The pace of change means no leader can rely solely on past success. Continuously learn from emerging technologies, evolving consumer behaviors, and new business models. Curiosity helps leaders identify opportunities early and adapt with confidence before disruption becomes a threat.
Finally, do the unglamorous work first. In AI, most effort lies in data, infrastructure, and foundations. Without solid foundation, any pilot risks a rapid collapse, and this may slow down even more your business transformation.
"Every market evolves, every technology changes, but one advantage remains timeless: the ability to understand people better than anyone else."