An Interview With Kieran Powell
AI natives will advance more quickly in the workplace. So start creating time for and investing in upskilling and reskilling yourself and your workforce now. As with any tool, you will not know how AI can best superpower you and your team’s work until your people begin testing it, learning how it works, and seeing where it best fits.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of business, decision-makers at the highest levels face the complex task of determining where AI can be most effectively utilized and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. This series seeks to explore the nuanced decisions made by C-Suite executives regarding the implementation of AI in their operations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Omar Johnson.
Named a “Brand Genius” by Adweek and one of the “Most Innovative CMOs” by Business Insider, Omar Johnson is leveraging his knowledge and experience dominating the technology, sports, fashion, and entertainment industries to help brands effectively partner with consumers and celebrities using AI. As the former CMO of Beats by Dre, he played a pivotal role in transforming the company from a $20 million brand into a $3 billion cultural phenomenon, significantly impacting the headphone industry. Omar has also held key positions at iconic companies like Nike and Apple, where he developed memorable campaigns such as “MVP (Most Valuable Puppets)” and “Rise” featuring LeBron James. His approach celebrates creativity and challenges conventional marketing norms, making him a respected voice in the industry. Omar has a BS in Biology and Chemistry from Georgia State University and an MBA from Emory University.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Thank you for the opportunity to share my story. My journey began in Brooklyn, NY, where I learned that hustle wins from a young age. It led me to pursue education in Atlanta, where I earned a degree in Biology and Chemistry from Georgia State University followed by an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. My career kicked off in consumer packaged goods (CPG), where I honed my skills in brand building and marketing strategy working with industry giants like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Campbell Soup Company. However, it was my time at Nike that ignited my passion for storytelling. At Nike, I worked on groundbreaking campaigns like the “MVP (Most Valuable Puppets)” during the NBA playoffs and “Rise,” featuring LeBron James, which allowed me to connect with audiences on a deeper level.
As I progressed at Nike, I spearheaded the development of the Nike+ sports music platform, establishing key revenue-generating relationships with major record labels and creating a resonant sports music program. This experience set the stage for my next chapter at Beats by Dre. Initially an audio technology startup, I helped transform Beats into a cultural phenomenon as CMO, expanding it from a $20 million company into a $3 billion powerhouse. We demonstrated that culture and purpose could transform an entire category and, along the way, drove the entire category to grow from $700 million to over $10 billion. My journey culminated when Beats was acquired by Apple, where I became a Vice President and caught the bug that would become the inspiration for my future — operational scale through technology.
Post-Apple, I formed a team that combined engineers, strategists, athletes, and creatives who were obsessed with translating the data and insights that drove culture and sales between brands and their audiences. For instance, our recent work on Kia’s “Legends in the Making” campaign with Draymond Green revealed surprising insights about his fanbase that traditional analytics might have missed. Throughout my career, I’ve remained committed to pushing boundaries and challenging norms in marketing and now technology, believing that great marketing celebrates our differences while also creating genuine connections.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One of the funniest mistakes I made early in my career was while organizing a promotional event in London. Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj were both attending, and I thought it would be a great idea to have them sit on the same couch all night. It was a very small couch. I should have known they both deserved their own throne.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes! My latest obsession has been bridging my marketing experience and expertise with the new technological frontiers in AI. We are working with clients such as Kia, Nissan, the Tennessee Titans, the Minnesota Vikings, and more while also engaging partners to expand across multiple sports leagues, entertainment firms, and brands.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?
In the rapidly evolving marketing landscape, AI has become a critical necessity for companies seeking speed, efficiency, and a competitive edge on strategic insights and creative. Traditional marketing approaches often struggle with processing vast amounts of data quickly and effectively. And while most people see great marketing as a function of instinct and creativity, I believe that even the most operationally-minded managers and directors can develop great marketing with the right tools.
AI and Machine Learning have emerged as transformative tools that can dramatically accelerate the path to understanding your consumers, developing campaigns, and going beyond generic strategies to create campaigns that move at the speed of culture.
For many clients, the primary use of AI has been to speed up complicated workflows and to generate creative. While I’m bullish on the future of AI workflow and generative tools, I’ve always believed that marketing is won in the trenches of strategy and deep understanding of your consumer target. And where traditional marketing might take weeks to develop a comprehensive campaign strategy, AI-driven approaches like ours produce nuanced consumer behavior-driven insight in hours, sometimes minutes. This acceleration allows marketing teams to be more agile, responsive, and strategic. However, speed and precision come with challenges from investing in robust AI infrastructure and training teams to work alongside AI technologies to developing company-wide ‘rules of the road’ on when, where, why, and how to effectively leverage AI while not exposing themselves to the many risks of AI (which can include hallucinations, bias, and employees giving the AI the wrong jobs).
Can you share a specific instance where AI initially seemed like the optimal solution but ultimately proved less effective than human intervention? What did this experience teach you about the limitations of AI in your field?
I always try to skate to where the puck is going. If I had a dollar for every time a marketer or agency said they “had data”, I would be on the Forbes list. The marketing industry is obsessed with data and there is a misconception that all you need to be successful is data. But when everyone has access to AI that reads, processes and correlates the internet (thanks to LLM’s), I realized that data alone could not sustain a competitive advantage. So, I shifted my focus to the human resources needed to transform data into “intelligence” (aka the result of synthesizing data). Brands like Beats by Dre, Bose, and Sony technically all have access to a lot of the same data. It’s how the people on my team at Beats transformed that data into intelligence that separated us from the pack. When you have that right intelligence, great marketing happens quickly and you can move at the speed of culture.
So while AI gives you access and domain to vast amounts of data, your people need to inform how AI interprets that data, what that data means to your company, which sources should be listened to, and how your company values drive its data translation. AI is very much like a new hire. It needs a clear job description, guidelines, rules to operate, and well-defined boundaries.
How do you navigate the ethical implications of implementing AI in your company, especially concerning potential job displacement and ensuring ethical AI usage?
When it comes to jobs, I don’t believe that AI can fully replace humans. Yes, when it comes to memory, processing power, summation, and fact-finding, AI always wins. But we need to remember this new technology is just a tool. There is work in every industry from business to marketing that still requires humans to do them. We need to look at AI not as a threat, but as an unprecedented opportunity for increased speed, precision, and scale of the creative process that allows us to do more, while also giving us back time to do the things that humans are innately magical at doing.
That being said, as with any new technology, AI natives and the leaders who adopt AI practices will advance quicker than late-comers. So upskilling and reskilling has to be the focus. I believe in giving people the tools they need to reskill and incorporate AI into their daily work.
At a more macro level, we have to have opinions on AI tools. We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. AI tools will only be as good as the humans defining them, so it’s our responsibility to develop AI in a way that is beneficial to marketing, to business, and ultimately to humanity. And by we, I mean all of us. We need to include everyone — from engineers to marketers and other non-technical partners. It’s us who have to define what success looks like while also being self-aware of the jobs that these tools can do better than us rather than pushing away the technology. In short, I approach implementing and developing AI as a tool that will superpower my team and marketers to do more and I encourage others to do the same.
Could you describe a successful instance in your company where AI and human skills were synergistically combined to achieve a result that neither could have accomplished alone?
We recently worked with Kia on their “Legends in the Making” campaign featuring Draymond Green, who served as the brand partner for this work. While building the campaign, we started by leveraging our AI tools to model a combination of public, proprietary, and private data on the target consumer, consumer perception of the product, and the types of voices that would make great brand partners. Our tool yielded several NBA players as options based on our client-specific inputs like product specs, target consumer, timing, and goals for the campaign. At the top of our list was Draymond Green.
While most companies would balk at utilizing one of the most controversial players on the court, we combined those AI-powered intelligence and data insights with our expertise in marketing to quantify the bridge between Draymond, the product, and the story. For example, Draymond represents many of the attributes of the vehicle. He is tough. He is capable. He is a family man who protects both his family and his team passionately. Most importantly, we saw that 87% of his fans believe that ‘he means what he says’, which drove his high believability scores. Draymond also came with some huge fringe benefits like an audience that not only included the target demographic, but also tons of other followers that expanded the range of the campaign’s appeal.
By combining AI with human expertise to find the narrative ties between Draymond’s upbringing and multifaceted public image with the Telluride’s style and capabilities, we were able to create authentic connections and deliver one of Kia’s best-performing ads on a relatively small budget in a very tight window of time. Marketing firms are notorious for making clients choose between speed, quality, and cost. Our combination of humans and AI allowed us to deliver on all 3.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans, and Why?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?
1 . Remember that AI is inherently biased. AI inherits bias from its developers, its training materials, and its measurement systems. So don’t take its answers blindly as fact. Humans have to first train models to deliver and then review its analysis with a critical human eye, taking those biases into account. For example, if you put my background and parents into a probability curve or an AI tool, it likely wouldn’t predict that I would become the CMO of a multibillion-dollar headphone company or a Vice President at Apple. Don’t let the AI probabilities rule out the human possibility.
2 . AI natives will advance more quickly in the workplace. So start creating time for and investing in upskilling and reskilling yourself and your workforce now. As with any tool, you will not know how AI can best superpower you and your team’s work until your people begin testing it, learning how it works, and seeing where it best fits.
3 . Our engineers always remind us about the dark side of a very necessary business practice, summarization. Our AI team has a saying, “summarization can be the devil”. Most businesses can not afford to speak to the proverbial ‘audience of 1’, which means that we have to summarize consumers into groups. This shotgun-style practice may have worked in the last century, but modern consumers are not easily identified in tightly packaged demographics that most media is sold by. This means that there are tons of wasted media dollars spent on demographically sorted audiences that would never consider your products. AI gives us a chance to create more precision in targeting the consumer we want to speak to. So while summarization is needed to process the sheer volumes of data that we now have access to, we have to be aware of the pitfalls of summarization and the risks of the giant probability curve that these LLM’s summarize under.
4 . Use AI to superpower your people, not replace them. We call it giving them the ‘Super Mario Effect’. Let AI and your people each do what they uniquely do best within your organization. AI can summarize millions of pages of data, research, and social commentary within minutes, something that would typically take days of staff time and resources to get to the same result. This empowers marketers, athletes, musicians, and creatives to jump right into what they do best — being themselves — and allowing them to be creative in their own way while creating deeper and more authentic connections.
5 . Stay true to your brand. Use AI in a way that compliments and augments your mission rather than adding it just because everyone else is. Every company claims to be AI-powered, yet a majority have no clear how or why the AI makes them better. Start there to create some AI-driven benefits and then market them because saying you are an AI company will become synonymous with saying “we have a website”. Of course you do. And, like having access to the web, we all do. So find ways to incorporate AI thoughtfully to drive a benefit (speed, quality, lower cost) and promote that. To be clear, I am not saying you shouldn’t say we are AI-enabled. I’m saying to mean it when you say it.
Looking towards the future, in which areas of your business do you foresee AI making the most significant impact, and conversely, in which areas do you believe a human touch will remain indispensable?
Yes, there are some jobs where people need to reskill or they will be downsized. But as long as humans are the end consumers, I don’t see many industries where human touch will become totally obsolete because of AI. Every field will still need a human’s unique capabilities in some way or another. AI will just superpower those individuals to do even more, even faster, and even better by automating certain aspects of their job.
At first, people were worried that MRIs would replace doctors. However, they’ve proved to be a tool that only made doctors better — improving diagnosis, allowing more one-on-one time with patients, and actually creating new jobs in MRI technicians. Even as MRI’s enter the AI age, there will still be a person who needs to help communicate with the patient and connect the dots between what that patient is feeling and the results.
Specifically, I see a marketing industry where AI does a lot of the jobs better than us as humans. We are already managing technology that does knowledge work like desk research, strategic summarization, and intelligence. Leveraging AI to automate and speed up the roles it does best opens up time for us to do the innately human jobs we do best like interpersonal interactions, conversations, and the art of experiencing reality.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
As a person who hustled his way into accessing great marketing knowledge, I would love to see a world where great marketing that is bespoke to every business, service, and target consumer is readily accessible to everyone. I see so many great products that never get a shot because they don’t have the budget, the direction, or the access to world-class marketing. It should not be more expensive than a trip to the public library. I want to see more artists and athletes become solo-prenuers. I want to see funds flow into nonprofits all over the world. And I want to see all of those people who came up with a great idea, but lacked marketing, win.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.opusintelligence.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarjohnson
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Omar Johnson On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.