WHAT ADVERTISING WEEK NEW YORK TAUGHT ME THAT AI NEVER COULD

I have a podcast. I have a production company. I create content for a living and I help other people do the same. I know how to use every AI tool in the game and I use them every single week.

And I just got back from New York with a notebook full of things no algorithm is ever going to teach me.

I went to Advertising Week NYC for work, representing KNOW Women in rooms full of brand executives, agency leads, and media minds who are shaping the way the world communicates. I sat in session after session, raised my hand to compete on a game show and met Flavor Flav Backstage. BUT What I actually learned was something way more important than marketing and advertising….. it was all of it IRL.

IRL is irreplaceable and the best teacher. Not in a nostalgic, put your phon -down, ‘back-in-my-day’ kind of way. In a this is where the real magic happens kind of way. The conversations that happened between sessions, in hallways, at lunch tables, on escalators, on the streets in New York City between strangers who realized they were building the same thing from different angles. That is where I learned more in 2 days than I could learn in two months of scrolling, researching, and prompting.

AI can give me information. It cannot give me the moment a speaker pauses mid-sentence and says something that lands so specifically in your chest. It cannot replicate the energy of a room full of people who all decided to show up. It cannot manufacture the kind of trust that gets built when someone looks you in the eye and says your name.

One session said it in a way I keep coming back to: devotion over awareness. “ROI gets you awareness. Devotion gets you remembered.” You cannot automate devotion. You cannot prompt your way into it. Devotion comes from showing up, consistently, as yourself, in rooms where it counts.

Another session said people are starving for unstructured, low pressure, real conversation. Not content. Conversation. Book clubs are winning. Roundtables are winning. Podcasts are winning. Because you cannot fake a real conversation and people know the difference. What are the kids calling it? Performative?

So go to the thing. Book the flight. Be in the room. Raise your hand to be on the game show- shout out to ‘The Perfect Line’.

XoXo Britt