Marketing in the Age of AI: Brand, Discovery, and Growth for Early-Stage Brands
It's never been easier to launch a brand. Getting found has never been harder.
AI can give you a name, a logo, a voice guide and a website by Friday. Shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what to buy instead of scrolling through search results, and those answers usually name only a few brands. Feeds are full, it costs more to acquire a customer, and the old playbook of building a brand and then buying traffic doesn't work like it used to.
For early-stage founders the question is simple: what still matters, what's changed, and where should your limited time and budget go first?
Join Capitalize VC Principal Simmone Seymour for a discussion with three Marketing extraordinaires, Mary Ann Bautista, Tom Lauro, and Naomi Odia, for a practical conversation on building a brand that people remember and AI recommends.
Who should attend: Founders and operators of early-stage CPG/consumer brands
What we'll cover
Brand foundations: what a brand really is (more than a logo and a color palette), which parts a pre-revenue company needs on day one, and where founders most often get positioning wrong
The marketing toolkit: paid, owned, earned and rented media, what order to do them in, and how your channel (DTC, Amazon, TikTok Shop, wholesale) changes your whole strategy
AI discovery and authority: what decides which brands get named in AI answers, why Reddit, YouTube and other third-party content now outweigh your own website, and what the playbook looks like at $1M vs. $10M
Organic growth: owned audiences, community, brand collabs and creator programs that drive sales instead of just impressions, even on a tiny budget
Paid media today: why creative now matters more than targeting, where your first paid dollar should go, and how to tell if it's working
Speakers
Mary Ann Bautista, Co-founder, TurboRank
Helps brands build the authority to be trusted, found and recommended across YouTube, Google, AI answers and third-party sources. She has nearly two decades in organic search and video, including an e-commerce program she built across 60+ YouTube channels.
Tom Lauro, Owner & Creative Director, Tom Lauro Design
Runs a Brooklyn creative studio that helps early-stage founders grow through brand systems and marketing strategy. He has also run campaigns for Walmart, Target and the Food Bank for NYC.
Naomi Odia, Fashion Tech Creator & Marketing Consultant
A London-based editorial creator behind @naomi0dia on TikTok, where she covers the companies, founders and infrastructure changing fashion. She previously did B2B marketing at Reuters and Cision.
Moderated by Simmone Seymour, Principal, Capitalize VC