Skip to content
  • Product
    • Meet Medialake
      • Platform Overview
      • Why Medialake?
      • Features
      • Integrations
    • Use Cases
      • Creative Operations
      • Content Lifecycle
      • Data Enrichment
      • Ecosystem Audit
      • Digital Transformation
      • Brand Safety
      • Regulatory compliance
      • Digital Rights
    Meet Medialake
    • Platform Overview
    • Why Medialake?
    • Features
    • Integrations
    Use Cases
    • Ecosystem Audit
    • Digital Rights
    • Content Lifecycle
    • Regulatory Compliance
    • Brand Safety
    • Digital Transformation
    • Creative Ops
    • Data Enrichment
  • Customers
    • Industries
      • Retail & Consumer Goods
      • Public Sector & Government
      • Utilities
      • Telecoms
      • Travel & Tourism
      • Advertising, Media & Entertainment
      • E-Commerce
      • Pharmaceutical, Healthcare & Life Sciences
      • Financial Services
    • Companies
      • Enterprise
      • SMB
      • Public Sector
    • Customer Stories
    Industries​
    • Retail & consumer goods
    • Financial Services
    • Healthcare & life sciences
    • E-commerce
    • Telecoms
    • Advertising, Media & Entertainment
    • Travel & Tourism
    • Utilities
    • Public Sector
    Companies
    • Enterprise
    • SMB
    • Public Sector
    Customer Stories
    • Production Studios: Visibility
    • FMCG: Content Lifecycle
    • Airline: Driving Efficiencies
    • Luxury Goods: Automation
    • Fashion: Lifecycle & ROI
  • Company
    • About
      • About
      • Careers
      • Sustainability
      • Responsible AI
    • Partners
      • Medialake Partners
    • Support
      • Contact
      • Pro and Custom Services
    • Partners
      • Medialake Partners
    About
    • About
    • Careers
    • Security
    • Sustainability
    • Responsible AI
    Support
    • Help Centre
    • Pro Services
    • Contact Us
    Partners
    • Partner
  • Resources
    • Resources
      • Blog
      • Brand resources
    Resources
    • Blog
    • Brand Resources
Get a live demo
Marketing, Thought Leadership

Santiago Gonzalez on Untangling Creative Ops, AI in Marketing, and the Myth of Personalization – ML Stories

July 3, 2025 Ben Buckley

In this edition of ML Stories, we spoke with Santiago Gonzalez, former Senior Manager of Creative Operations & Marketing at Keurig Dr Pepper. With a background that spans documentary filmmaking and corporate marketing, Santiago brings a refreshingly pragmatic and brutally honest lens to creative operations. From scaling complex workflows to building smarter infrastructure for modern brands, his approach blends strategic oversight with a keen sense of what slows teams down—and what sets them free.

We caught up with Santiago to dig into the realities of operating creative at scale, the evolving role of AI, and what happens when personalization goes too far.


What keeps you up at night in creative operations?

When we think about creative—not just operationally, but from a tech standpoint—the thing that keeps me up is that everybody’s still reacting. No one’s really creating the technology. You end up building on top of a system that gets more and more tangled. Like the transit systems of New York or London: no one’s ever gone back to fix the base. It’s just stacked infrastructure.


What role should AI play in brand marketing?

Let AI do a lot of that lower funnel work. Variant generation, data scrubbing, metadata tagging—that stuff can be done with AI. We should let AI do all of our hygienic marketing and creative work and save our really talented teams for the high-level stuff. Brand relaunch? Throw the best at it. New market? Get your best brains in a room and go.


What’s a belief you’ve changed your mind about?

Everyone always said personalization is the golden ticket. But what I’m seeing out in the real world is people starting to distrust things that feel too specific. It’s not like the Coke bottles where people searched for their name. Now it’s like—how do they know it’s me? That kind of extreme personalization might actually push customers away.


Do marketing teams have enough visibility into what’s working?

I think there’s plenty of visibility. I don’t think there’s enough understanding. You can AB test till the cows come home, but we haven’t established a widely agreed-upon way to interpret the results. One test might resonate with one demographic, another with a different one—so which wins? At the end of the day, you should let data decide for you. It’s very inhuman—and that’s what it should be.


What makes a marketing team great?

The best teams I’ve been on weren’t just built around the job titles—they were built around the people. I’ve worked with editors who were in punk bands, project managers with law degrees, designers who performed slam poetry. That kind of range gives you options you don’t even realize you’ll need. It creates better ideas, better collaboration, and it makes the team feel like they’ve got skin in the game.

  • Data
  • Digital Transformation
Ben Buckley

Post navigation

Previous
Next

Search

Categories

  • AI (1)
  • Governance, Compliance, Licensing (2)
  • Latest Product Releases (2)
  • Marketing (11)
  • News (1)
  • Research (1)
  • Thought Leadership (19)

Recent Posts

  • Inside the Martech Mind: Antonio Pellegrino Talks Teams, Technology, and the Future of Marketing
  • Santiago Gonzalez on Untangling Creative Ops, AI in Marketing, and the Myth of Personalization – ML Stories
  • Keith Tomlinson on Creative Confidence, AI Clarity, and Embracing the Unknown – ML Stories

Tags

AI Compliance Content Lifecycle Content Utilization Creative Ops Data Digital Rights Digital Transformation Governance Licensing Luxury Utilization Visibility

Similar Posts

Marketing, Thought Leadership

Inside the Martech Mind: Antonio Pellegrino Talks Teams, Technology, and the Future of Marketing

July 10, 2025 Ben Buckley

They’re not just cleaning up the chaos — they’re uncovering where the growth really is.In a world of content overload, structured data is the difference between guesswork and smart reinvestment. Know what’s working. Do more of it. That’s the game now.

Marketing, Thought Leadership

Keith Tomlinson on Creative Confidence, AI Clarity, and Embracing the Unknown – ML Stories

June 26, 2025 Team Medialake

They’re not just cleaning up the chaos — they’re uncovering where the growth really is.In a world of content overload, structured data is the difference between guesswork and smart reinvestment. Know what’s working. Do more of it. That’s the game now.

Marketing, Thought Leadership

How Núria Antoja Builds Brands—and the Teams Behind Them – ML Stories

June 12, 2025 Team Medialake

They’re not just cleaning up the chaos — they’re uncovering where the growth really is.In a world of content overload, structured data is the difference between guesswork and smart reinvestment. Know what’s working. Do more of it. That’s the game now.

Product
  • Platform overview
  • Why Medialake
  • Features
  • Integrations
  • Pricing
Company
  • About
  • Careers
  • Security
  • Responsible AI
  • Blog
  • Downloads
Resources
  • Blog
  • Reports
  • Downloads
Support
  • Contact us
  • Help centre
  • Pro services
Follow Us

© 2025 Medialake, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners.

  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy