Guest
Brendan McCarthy
Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Seedtag
A marketing and communications leader with stints at Edelman, Nielsen and five years at Criteo, now at Seedtag, arguing that in an industry where everyone has an AI story, only the data and the proof count.
About
Brendan McCarthy is Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Seedtag, the contextual advertising company, a role he took up two and a half months before this conversation was recorded at Cannes. He is a marketing and communications leader known for work at the intersection of reputation, measurement and ad tech storytelling, having built and led teams at Edelman, Nielsen and Criteo before joining Seedtag.
McCarthy spent a long period at Edelman, including work in India where he supported Starbucks as it entered a market he describes as understandably wary of multinationals, with policies requiring joint ventures and a national preference for tea over coffee. He moved to Nielsen as digital advertising was, in his words, starting to blow up and advertising standards were being rewritten around it, keeping measurement at the top of his agenda. He then spent five years at Criteo, where retail and media measurement sat at the core of the go to market and where, by his account, the company helped create the commerce media category, an exercise that forced hard thinking about how a word like commerce translates in key markets such as Japan.
At Seedtag, McCarthy inherited what he calls a dream setup of talent in a smaller, nimbler team, and a business he says has 10 years of contextual data behind it. His early read on the gap was client storytelling, and his early fix has been to get clients to prove the claims, including a bake off between standard contextual and Seedtag's neuro-contextual methodology run with Lenovo and verified through measurement partners. He combines marketing and communications in one title deliberately, arguing that the pyramid of authority in comms has fundamentally changed and that neither discipline works without the other.
Career21 years
- 2026 to now Seedtag Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
- 2020 to 2026 Criteo Chief Marketing Officer
- 2015 to 2020 Nielsen Senior Vice President, Head of Communications & Product Marketing, Nielsen Global Media
- 2006 to 2015 Edelman Senior Vice President, Corporate & Public Affairs
Show earlier roles: Spitfire Strategies
- 2005 to 2006 Spitfire Strategies Account Executive
How Brendan thinks3 convictions
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Precision is the next prize
McCarthy frames the cookie era as a trade that has expired: it bought precision on an in-market shopper, but on a cycle so long that the purchase may already have happened. Contextual AI, he argues, restores scale, and the work now is pushing precision further down the funnel towards the purchase decision. He treats that as the measurable test of whether contextual AI earns its place, rather than a matter of positioning.
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Show the product working
In a category McCarthy describes as flooded with the same claims, he puts his faith in live demonstration over deck-based persuasion. He describes typing invented briefs into Seedtag's AI to see what comes back, then running the same exercise with clients using their real objectives. His view is that a plan produced in seconds and ready to ship does more to open minds than any amount of differentiated language.
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Localise or be ignored
Drawing on category building at Criteo in Japan and market entry work for Starbucks in India at Edelman, McCarthy argues that a single global story survives only if it defers to local meaning. He talks about respecting local stakeholders and what a market actually prefers before deciding what to launch and how to say it. Success, in his telling, came from entering thoughtfully rather than loudly.