Discovery Is Changing: Paula Mantle on AI, Brand Consistency and the End of ‘More Content’

ICYMI: Paula Mantle catches wp with 10 Minute Martech on why discovery is shifting from browsing to recommendations.

“For marketers, it’s really easy for us to obsess over that moment of transaction, but the transaction is really just a reflection of the connection that’s already been built over time.”

In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Paula Mantle, VP of Marketing at Branch, joins host Sara Faatz to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way people discover, evaluate and engage with brands.

From the growing importance of linking infrastructure and connected journeys to the failure of the “more content” era of AI, Paula breaks down why consistency, curiosity and human connection matter more than ever as marketers navigate an increasingly fragmented digital world.

Paula’s Big Idea: AI Is Reshaping Discovery, Not Replacing Human Connection

Paula reframes the AI conversation around a simple but important shift: discovery is moving away from traditional browsing and toward recommendations, signals and AI-assisted decision-making.

But despite the technology changing, the fundamentals behind human trust remain the same. People still choose brands they recognize and feel connected to.

For marketers, that means the real work happens long before the transaction itself. AI may influence how discovery happens, but brand consistency, connected experiences and meaningful storytelling are still what create intent in the first place.

Paula Mantle’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech

1. Transactions Are a Reflection of Earlier Decisions

The real buying decision usually happens long before the click or purchase itself.

2. AI Discovery Is Starting to Mirror Human Discovery

Recommendations, familiarity and trust signals are becoming more important than traditional browsing behaviors.

3. Linking Infrastructure Matters More Than Ever

Every QR code, social link and ad should be treated as infrastructure that carries intent through the customer journey.

4. Fragmented Experiences Kill Conversion

Disconnected experiences across channels create friction and reduce performance.

5. Consistency Is a Competitive Advantage

Branch’s rebrand reinforced how important consistency is across messaging, product, sales and content.

6. AI Can Support Brand Consistency at Scale

AI can help marketers maintain contextual consistency across increasingly fragmented channels.

7. The ‘More Content’ Era Failed

Early AI experimentation focused too heavily on volume, leading to what Paula describes as “slop.”

8. Better Beats More

The future belongs to high-quality, human-centered content rooted in first-party data and real narratives.

9. Curiosity Is the Skill with the Longest Shelf Life

As AI rapidly changes workflows, curiosity becomes more valuable than rigid playbooks.

10. Brand and Experience Matter More Than Perfect Attribution

Even the most precise measurement means nothing if the customer experience itself is broken.

Paula’s Martech Hot Take

“We are overvaluing measurement precision and undervaluing brand and experience.”

Paula believes many marketers are becoming too focused on attribution and granular measurement while overlooking the importance of cohesive customer experiences. For her, strong brand recognition and connected journeys matter just as much as the ability to measure performance.

Paula’s Inspiration List

Paula is drawn to people who are openly experimenting with AI and sharing both the wins and the failures that come with it:

• Mada Seghete – Founder of Branch and Upside, known for building transparently and openly sharing lessons from experimentation and AI workflow automation.
• Dan Amati – Co-founder at Upside, helping document the realities of building modern AI-driven marketing systems in real time.

For Paula, the most valuable voices right now are the ones willing to share the messy realities of learning and adapting in public, not just polished success stories.

Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode

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Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series

Lindsay Hagan, VP of Marketing and Co-Head of Revenue at Conductor, joins us to explore what’s actually working in the world of AI-powered discoverability, why answer engine optimization has become a company-wide effort spanning content, PR, social and community teams, and how marketers can balance experimentation with strategy as the rules continue to evolve.

From cross-functional AI hackathons and AEO visibility to the growing importance of expert-driven content, Lindsay shares why the future belongs to teams that learn how to work with AI, not compete against it.

Want to Keep Reading?

Here’s the full transcript so you can explore every insight from Paula’s conversation with Sara.

Sara Faatz: I’m Sara Faatz and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.

Paula Mantle: For marketers, it’s really easy for us to obsess over that moment of transaction, but the transaction is really just a reflection of the connection that’s already been built over time. So that real decision actually happened earlier. What’s interesting with AI is it’s really starting to work in the same way. So discovery is shifting from browsing to recommendations and obviously is really soon going to move into transacting, which is super interesting and is totally different from the way we’ve seen technology work historically.

Sara Faatz: That’s Paula Mantle, vice president of marketing at Branch. Let’s get started.

Sara Faatz: Well, Paula, excited to have you here. I think we’ll just get started. With the world seemingly hyper-fixated on AI, what’s really interesting to me is the way it’s impacting human behavior, the way we seek information or engage with brands. With that in mind, where do you see the real opportunity for marketers today?

Paula Mantle: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that’s a great question. Before I worked in tech, I actually spent a decade in the wine industry. And wine to me, is one of the purest examples of why brand matters. If you’ve ever stood in front of a giant wine wall at a store, you know the feeling. There are hundreds of bottles, regions you’ve never heard of, varietals you can’t pronounce. Most people don’t analyze their way through that decision. They just reach for something that they recognize. And I think for marketers, it’s really easy for us to obsess over that moment of transaction, that purchase, the click, the install, that’s our goal, so we’re focused on it. But the transaction is really just a reflection of the connection that’s already been built over time. So that real decision actually happened earlier, much earlier often, the moment the story stuck in your head and you got it. What’s interesting with AI is it’s really starting to work in the same way. So discovery is shifting from browsing to recommendations and obviously is really soon going to move into transacting. So when your AI friend suggests a brand, it’s often drawing on all those signals that that brand has already created across the market.

Paula Mantle: So AI is really starting to work in the same way that human discovery works, which is super interesting and is totally different from the way we’ve seen technology work historically. So for marketers, the connection still creates that intent. The technology just determines whether you can capture that moment when someone is ready to act, whether that someone is AI or a human being. And then the job becomes how do you build those signals and then recognize that moment of intent, make sure you can carry it through to action, whether that action is taken by a human or AI. So really interesting time right now.

Sara Faatz: Are there things that you and your team have been doing, experimenting from an AI perspective? If so, what’s worked and what hasn’t, and what have you learned from all of that?

Paula Mantle: Yeah. So keeping on the theme of intent, we’ve been experimenting a lot around what happens when intent shows up outside of traditional channels. It used to be really easy to measure what people were doing and how they got to your brand or how they got to a purchase or how they got to an app install, whatever the goal is. But one thing that worked really well for our team, and I see this with a lot of our customers as well, is treating linking, how you get from point A to point B, as infrastructure and not a tactic. So every QR code, every social link, every ad, every channel becomes a way to capture and carry that intent versus actually having it be a moment where you can lose somebody. And so that goal is to carry that intent into an experience that actually converts. And when you can connect all those moments across all of those channels instead of treating them in isolation, we see that performance really improves because that journey for the user or for the AI friend really feels continuous. And so where this comes to life for me personally as an example, so we recently refreshed our brand identity at Branch, and anybody who’s been through a rebrand knows it really reinforced this concept of consistency.

Sara Faatz: Yes.

Paula Mantle: So experimentation only works once you have that layer of consistency. And so when we think about, we didn’t just change the way we looked or showed up in the market, but we really wanted to focus on how we were showing up consistently everywhere. So in the product, in the messaging, in the content, in our sales org, every single ad, every single social post, the number of brand police has quadrupled or exponentially so. So as the world really increasingly fragments, as you have all those channels, more channels than ever, that consistency is what really builds that recognition. And recognition is obviously what drives those decisions. AI can really help with that, that layer of consistency and that layer of figuring out what the context is so that you can feed the right things into your AI for that context layer that becomes the basis of everything that we’re doing as marketers. And on the opposite side, when I think about what hasn’t worked particularly for experimentation, I think the early days of AI really felt like we could just create more. More content, more campaigns, more variation, more personalization. But obviously that hasn’t panned out in the way that anybody really wanted.

Paula Mantle: Now you see it today and you’re just sort of cringing at the level of flop that was created with the proliferation of stuff, particularly content. And that period when everyone was like, “More, more, more,” now the goal really has shifted to better. So things that we only could produce. First-party data, individual narratives, one-to-one communications. It’s the things that still make us human. And ultimately, that’s what we’re all looking for. So that part where we tried to replace our humanity with experimentation in the AI world, it just shouldn’t happen. It’s not something that should happen.

Sara Faatz: Oh, I love all of that. I want to go back to your brand refresh, because one of the… And preaching consistency is, you’re just singing to my heart. But one of the questions I have for you there is that if you’re looking at then you have the old brand, and we know that everything lives on in the internet. How do you bridge the gap between the old and maintaining consistency in the new? And have you thought through a lot of that?

Paula Mantle: Yeah, I think anyone who has done a rebrand knows that you have a lot of historical to try to clean up. So we rely a lot on our partners, having conversations with people in advance so that we know that the people in the industry are helping proliferate this message on our behalf. I think it helps that the whole world is sort of shifting, and so the messaging and the look that was from three months ago feels really outdated already, honestly. And the way that shift has happened so quickly, I think that it’s pretty easy to see what’s old and what’s new. And we had the luxury of also revamping our entire platform, so we have a whole new platform, we have all new capabilities within that platform, we have a new brand to match that. And so that connection between everything new, but keeping all of the old historical that makes us who we are at the core and then translating that into the new world is how we were able to get through that process and help with the consistency as we push it forward.

Sara Faatz: Awesome. I love that. And then when you talk about what didn’t work and the slop. I think we saw also recently with Sora just going away. Right? You can’t replace that. Are you, though, using AI in any way now? What skill would you think a marketer needs today in this new era that is working, that kind of bridges what you’ve learned and what’s both working and not working?

Paula Mantle: Yeah. So when I think about skills, it’s shifting so quickly what AI is able to do. And so an even more fundamental skill that, hands down, I think is the most important thing is curiosity. Everything is shifting so quickly that playbooks expire before you can even write them. I was at this event recently, and there were five CMOs on stage. They had decades of experience between them, and they shared this humble moment where the thing that they were worried about most was whether they’re going to become obsolete. This amount of experience, these people that we are all looking to on stage I feel this myself as well. I know there are so many people who have this fear when they talk about AI and how it’s influencing our workflows and how work is just fundamentally changing. But on the brighter side, nothing has ever leveled the playing field more than AI. All of those playbooks, all of that information that’s in every CMO’s brain is really there for the taking.

Paula Mantle: You can copy the most brilliant playbooks in the world. I personally can get more technical than I ever could before. There are a lot of people who can communicate in a way that they never could before because they can use AI to help get the right words that were in their head onto paper. There are new playbooks that are being built every day, and the fear comes from knowing that playbooks that used to work just don’t work anymore. So really the way to battle that is marketers should constantly be asking, “Where is behavior shifting? What are customers doing differently today? Why did things work? Why didn’t it?” And when you pair that with the ability to act on what you’re learning, it’s such an important skill to really be curious and not afraid of what AI can do for you and instead of you.

Sara Faatz: Awesome. Who are you following these days? You talked about going to a conference and seeing a bunch of CMOs on stage. Who do you follow for inspiration or information?

Paula Mantle: Yeah. I could give you a whole list of the podcasts I listen to, all the newsletters I’m subscribed to, but right now, what actually I value the most is the individual humans who are willing to show the messiness of their work, because let’s be clear, it is very, very messy right now. And so the individuals who are building and sharing those wins and losses, not just in a theoretical or philosophical way, like, what are you doing today? Did it work or not? What are all the steps? How can I replicate it? So one person that I really respect and have always respected, but particularly right now, is a woman named Mada Seghete. She founded Branch, she hired me, but she’s also now founded a new company called Upside. They’re building for marketers also, a forensic sort of attribution system. And she’s really building in the open with her team, her co-founder Dan Amati especially. They’re super transparent about their journey. The hard parts, the way that they’re experimenting with AI in detail. They just had an amazing webinar that’s like, How We automated All Of Our Marketing Workflows. But that kind of honesty, it’s just so much more useful than the polished narratives. It makes us… Those polished narratives make us all feel like we’re so far behind, like we’re never going to catch up, or going back to that we’re going to be obsolete. And so really that humanistic nature of the way that an individual shares, and particularly a humble individual who’s not afraid to show the mess and to show their flaws. I absolutely love that right now.

Sara Faatz: Well, one last question for you. Do you have a martech hot take?

Paula Mantle: Yeah. Well, I definitely feel like we are overvaluing measurement precision, and I say that coming from a measurement company myself, but also undervaluing brand and the experience. So there’s this constant push. It’s been true for marketers forever. How do we get more granular? How do we get more exact? How do we make sure that we are attributing absolutely everything to something and really understand that journey from A to Z? The black box has never been darker and blacker. And so particularly as marketers are asked to do more with less, this pressure just builds. But when I think about it, if the brand or the experience, even worse, is disjointed, it doesn’t matter how well you measure it. Our entire goal is to get somebody to click on an ad, but if they click on the ad and don’t have a good experience after that click to get to the place where they can actually convert, we’re just wasting money. And so I think that brand and experience are hand in hand with measurement and trying to get to that conversion state.

Sara Faatz: That’s fantastic. Well, Paula, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation today.

Paula Mantle: Yeah, me as well. Thanks so much.

Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Till next time, I’m Sara Faatz and this is 10 Minute Martech.

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