Most brands think viral marketing takes months of planning and massive budgets. Nick Tran engineered it in 72 hours.

In this segment from Marketing Trends, the former Global Head of Marketing at TikTok breaks down the exact reverse-engineered playbook that turned unknown creators like the Ocean Spray skateboarder into overnight viral sensations, and why the traditional 2-3 month campaign timeline is dead.

From understanding why Nick tells marketing leaders to "kill your KPIs" and hire for intuition instead, to learning how he identified viral potential before it happened, this is a masterclass in speed-to-market and cultural relevance.

If your team is still running 90-day campaign cycles while competitors are shipping in weeks, this framework will show you exactly what you're missing, and how to move faster without sacrificing quality.

Chapters:

00:00 - The Reverse-Engineered Playbook

04:32 - Project Cheetah: 72 Hours to Viral

09:15 - Moving Upmarket Without Losing Your Soul

13:48 - Five Things Marketing Leaders Must Unlearn

This episode is brought to you by Lightricks.

LTX is the all-in-one creative suite for AI-driven video production; built by Lightricks to take you from idea to final 4K render in one streamlined workspace.

Powered by LTX-2, our next-generation creative engine, LTX lets you move faster, collaborate seamlessly, and deliver studio-quality results without compromise.

Try it today at ltx.studio

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The marketing teams winning with AI today are not the ones chasing every new model release. They are the ones who found the boring, repetitive tasks their teams hate and automated those first.

Nir Pochter, Co-Founder and CMO at Lightricks, joins Stephanie Postles on Marketing Trends to break down what AI actually means for creative workflows and why most teams are still using it wrong.

You’ll learn:

- The "algebra problem" of AI adoption

- How to save your design team 80% of their time

- Why the gap between marketers who use AI well and those who don't is widening fast.

- How to use an LLM scoring system to pre-review documents for you

- The dangerous trend of "AI Marketer" job titles

- What’s really in store for the future of video+AI

Key Moments:

00:00 — Why AI Hasn't Improved Creative Output Yet

02:06 — The Algebra Problem: Tools vs. Knowing How to Use Them

07:27 — Nir's Background: AI PhD to Lightricks and FaceTune

09:46 — What Used to Take Weeks Now Takes Minutes

13:35 — Why Automating Everything Failed Miserably

16:38 — Start with What People Hate Doing

20:08 — The LLM Scoring System: Nothing Gets Reviewed Without an 85

21:43 — Train Your LLM to Be Mean, Not Nice

23:32 — Building Custom GPTs with Company Guidelines

26:30 — The Pitfall: Using AI to Please Leadership

28:47 — From Toys to Tools: Why Text-to-Video Isn't Enough

31:05 — Coca-Cola's 70,000 Prompts (Was It Worth It?)

34:41 — AI Won't Replace Creatives, But This Will

37:04 — The Two Critical Skills: Prompting and Curation

37:55 — How AI Multiplies the Skills Gap (7 vs 10 Example)

42:47 — What CMOs Should Be Asking Their Teams

46:20 — Why "AI Marketer" Is LinkedIn Fluff

This episode is brought to you by Lightricks.

LTX is the all-in-one creative suite for AI-driven video production; built by Lightricks to take you from idea to final 4K render in one streamlined workspace.

Powered by LTX-2, our next-generation creative engine, LTX lets you move faster, collaborate seamlessly, and deliver studio-quality results without compromise.

Try it today at ltx.studio

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The websites that win today are not the ones with the most content. They are the ones that deliver a fast, clean experience in the very first second a visitor arrives.

Josh Koenig, Co-Founder and SVP of Marketing at Pantheon, joins Stephanie Postles on Marketing Trends to break down what he is seeing across thousands of high-traffic sites and why most teams still miss the basics. He explains how the shift from search to ask is changing online discovery, what AI bots prioritize when they crawl a site, and why the fundamentals of clarity, structure, and speed now matter more than any growth hack.

Josh also shares how teams are using Pantheon’s new Content Publisher to eliminate copy-and-paste workflows, why vibe coding is giving non-technical teams the ability to build richer digital experiences, and what the rise of AI-powered crawlers means for anyone trying to stand out on the modern web.

00:00 — The Two-Second Rule: Why Website Speed Kills Conversions

04:30 — The Hidden Growth Killer Most Marketers Miss

08:21 — AI Crawlers Gone Wild: The UFC Fight Night Story

12:22 — Five Evergreen Website Tactics for the LLM Era

16:13 — The Gated Content Dilemma: Lead Gen vs AI Indexing

20:42 — Avoiding Artificial SEO: When Optimization Goes Too Far

23:10 — The Generic Content Trap Poisoning AI Search Results

26:00 — Content Publisher for Google Docs: Eliminating Copy-Paste

31:53 — The CMO-CTO Partnership: Why This Relationship Unlocks Growth

36:05 — Brokering Peace Between Marketing and IT Teams

40:20 — Vibe Coding for Marketers: The Prototype Revolution

44:06 — Next.js Explained: Open Source for Marketing Development

48:17 — From Vibe Code to Production: The Last Mile Problem

51:03 — Data Analysis Without the Wait: LLMs Democratizing Insights

54:20 — The Entrepreneurial Marketer: Why Technical Fluency Is Required

This episode is brought to you by Lightricks.

LTX is the all-in-one creative suite for AI-driven video production; built by Lightricks to take you from idea to final 4K render in one streamlined workspace.

Powered by LTX-2, our next-generation creative engine, LTX lets you move faster, collaborate seamlessly, and deliver studio-quality results without compromise.

Try it today at ltx.studio

Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.