Guest · Attention and context
Kerel Cooper
Chief Marketing Officer, MarketCast
Kerel Cooper was CMO of GumGum, the contextual advertising company, and is now CMO of MarketCast. With 26-plus years in advertising, from ad operations and account management through to commercial leadership at Group Black and two CMO roles, he makes the case that contextual and mindset-based advertising is not only more ethical but more effective.
About
Kerel Cooper is Chief Marketing Officer of MarketCast, the audience intelligence and creative effectiveness company, having previously served as CMO of GumGum from July 2024 to November 2025. He is also Co-Founder of the Minority Report Podcast and an Adjunct Professor at Kean University.
Kerel did not come up through a traditional marketing track. He started at Earthweb.com running ad operations, moved to Jupitermedia as Director of Ad Operations, and then spent over seven years at Advance Digital leading ad operations, programmatic strategy, and eventually the company’s first private marketplace. From there he joined LiveIntent, progressing to CMO, then became President of Advertising at Group Black before joining GumGum.
His non-traditional path is central to his CMO philosophy. Understanding what sales teams face on the front line, what account management deals with in delivery, and how operations work behind the campaigns has made him a more commercially precise CMO than the functional track would have produced. He describes diversity as a commercial superpower: his Japan marketing manager, who speaks the language and understands the cultural nuances, is a genuine competitive advantage in a market where a one-size-fits-all approach fails.
Career27 years
- 2025 to now MarketCast Chief Marketing Officer
- 2024 to 2025 GumGum Chief Marketing Officer
- 2022 to 2024 Group Black President of Advertising
- 2017 to 2022 LiveIntent SVP Global Marketing then CMO
Show earlier roles: LiveIntent, Advance Digital, Jupitermedia, Earthweb.com
- 2014 to 2017 LiveIntent SVP Account Management and SVP Customer Journey/Product Marketing
- 2007 to 2014 Advance Digital Director of Ad Operations through to Senior Director of Digital Ad Platform Strategies
- 2000 to 2007 Jupitermedia Director of Ad Operations
- 1999 to 2000 Earthweb.com Ad Operations Manager
How Kerel thinks3 convictions
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Context and mindset beat cookie-based targeting for both effectiveness and trust
GumGum’s mindset graph is built on the principle that the content a person is consuming in the moment they see an ad is the most powerful signal available. If a Chelsea fan is reading about their team’s win, their emotional state is positive, proud, and open to celebration. Kerel’s argument is that this contextual and emotional precision is not just more ethical than retargeting. It is more effective. The creative and the context are aligned. That alignment is what creates the memorable advertising people describe when asked for their favourite ad.
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AI will make us better communicators because prompting demands precision
Kerel’s hot take on AI is that the discipline of prompt engineering is a communication skill in disguise. Writing a prompt that produces the output you need requires you to know exactly what you want, articulate it precisely, and frame it in the specific voice and context of the brand you are working with. Most people and most organisations struggle with exactly that. AI raises the stakes for that skill because ambiguous prompts produce useless outputs at scale.
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Diversity is a commercial superpower, not a compliance exercise
Kerel’s case for diversity in marketing teams is commercial before it is ethical. A global CMO who applies the same campaign approach across every market loses effectiveness at every localisation boundary. Different languages, different cultural norms, different media consumption habits, different regulatory environments: every one of these requires someone on the team who actually knows them. The Japan example is specific and concrete. The principle scales: every market where you need to be effective is a market where you need people who understand it.
