The new Signal & Noise episode with Alex Collmer, “When Content Becomes Infinite,” is now live. Listen (or watch): When Content Becomes Infinite: Alex Collmer on Creative Intelligence in the AI Advertising Era

Alex Collmer is Founder & Executive Chairman of Vidmob, which he built from a marketplace connecting marketers with video creators into what it now calls a creative data company. He argues that creative is one of advertising’s most important and least-instrumented variables.

Generative AI has made advertising radically cheaper to create, but if every brand can produce infinite variations from the same models, what creates competitive advantage? Alex, Brett, and Rio dig into why the next battleground may be the intelligence behind what to create, why it works, and what brands learn from every ad.

Alex argues foundation models are becoming commodities, so the edge is the proprietary creative data a brand and their agency brings into them. He explains how Vidmob360 uses APIs, MCP, and agents to let marketers interrogate live creative performance, spot fatigue, and write better briefs, and whether brands should let platforms own that intelligence.

The three also take on the risk of creative sameness, what AI means for designers, and Alex’s warning for brands that hand all their creative intelligence to the platforms: “Don’t be surprised ten years from now if you’re out of business.

Plus: you’ll learn who won the 50-mile race he ran against 16 horses!

By Lucas Longacre

Three days of keynotes, panels, and interviews at TMRE (The Market Research Event) 2026 in Denver made one thing clear: AI is transforming market research, and human judgment, empathy, and high-quality data matter more than ever.

Lucas argues that AI knows what’s been said and not what’s true, and that speed only gets you to the wrong answer faster if the creative isn’t working. He also covers fraud threatening real human data, the shift from episodic to always-on insight, and why the human in the mix is not optional.