Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli

Hosted by Gabriella Mirabelli

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100

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Aug 2026

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About the show

New ideas and new technology are causing seismic shifts the media industry. Meet the innovators, the risk-takers and the disrupters on the front lines of change from Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and beyond. This is the "Up Next Podcast" with Gabriella Mirabelli.

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60 recent

September 10, 2026Episode 42824 min

Un 428 - Anku Rani. Scoring Cultural Accuracy.

Anku Rani , a doctoral researcher at MIT and an MIT Tata Center fellow, joins Gabriella Mirabelli to challenge a working assumption in AI video production: that a better-looking clip is automatically a better clip. Rani built a culture score that separates identity, behavior, and context, then tested it against leading video generation models and against real viewers from nine countries. The results complicate how brands should think about choosing a video model for global campaigns, especially once cinematic polish and cultural accuracy start pulling in opposite directions.

September 3, 2026Episode 342728 min

UN 427 - IJRM. Beyond Before & After.

Do process photos increase charity donations? Josh Lundberg , assistant professor of marketing at North Carolina Central University, joins Up Next to answer that question. His research with colleagues, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing , finds that photos showing a charity's process, the actual steps taken to help someone, get people to donate more than the standard before-and-after photo. Gabriella and Josh talk through why this works, when it doesn't, and what any charity can do about it right away.

August 27, 2026Episode 42626 min

UN 426 - Jack Myers. Judgment is Scarce.

Jack Myers , media ecologist, futurist, and Peabody Award-winning author, joins Up Next to argue that AI has not solved the judgment problem in business; it has hidden it. As intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, discernment becomes the scarce asset, and Myers explains why organizations keep outsourcing trust to algorithms instead of building it in people. The conversation covers the coming collapse of agency holding companies, why hiring processes filter out the humans who matter most, and what CMOs should stop, start, and continue doing with their media budgets. A direct look at what AI changes, and what it doesn't.

August 20, 2026Episode 42526 min

UN 425 - YPulse. Youth Data Pipeline.

Dan Coates , CEO and co-founder of YPulse , joins Gabriella Mirabelli to explain why the youth research firm built a direct connector into Claude and other similar gen AI systems. Coates describes YPulse's move toward what he calls decision support infrastructure: survey data atomized down to the individual respondent, queryable alongside a client's own internal data. The reports and question design that built the business haven't gone away; the connector is a new path into that same research. The conversation covers data provenance, the EU AI Act's consent requirements, and why Coates believes AI models are becoming a distribution channel for research vendors.

August 13, 2026Episode 42426 min

UN 424 - Scott Goodson. Brand Purpose.

Scott Goodson founded StrawberryFrog, a global agency built on a philosophy he calls movement marketing. In this episode, he and Gabriella Mirabelli trace that framework from its origins through decades of application across healthcare, automotive, consumer goods, and fintech. Goodwin explains why the building blocks of any real movement include dissatisfaction and a named nemesis, and why brands that skip those elements tend to produce noise rather than momentum. The conversation covers Pampers, Northwell Health, Smart car, and a recent Visa campaign that generated 20,000 organic posts without paid media.

August 6, 2026Episode 42128 min

UN 423 - IJRM. Passive Power.

Rod Duclos , Associate Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business School at Western University, joins Up Next to discuss research published in April 2026 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing ( IJRM ). The paper, co-authored with Amir Sepehri and Jonah Berger , draws on over 160,000 real complaints and five controlled experiments to show that the grammatical voice customers use when filing a complaint reliably predicts escalation risk before any explicit threat is made. The conversation covers the mechanism behind this signal, its limits, the looming AI confound, and what a CMO should do with it.

July 30, 2026Episode 42025 min

UN 422 - Joshua Lifrak. Win Today.

Joshua Lifrak spent five years building the mental skills program for the Chicago Cubs, including the 2016 World Series championship run, before taking that framework into the corporate world. His book, Win Today , lays out six daily practices for mental resilience and peak performance. In this episode, Lefrak breaks down each step, from framing how you meet the day to the science of why negativity is a protection mechanism, not a character flaw, and explains why willpower will always lose to systems.

July 23, 2026Episode 42126 min

UN 421 - Kaley Mullin. Reading Culture Right.

Kaley Mullin is a sociologist and cultural insights practitioner who cofounded Cool Shiny Insights after serving as Head of Youth and Trends at YouTube and working on Disney's ABC Family to Freeform rebrand. In this episode, she explains what semiotics does for brand strategy, how cultural listening differs from social listening, and how to use the residual/dominant/emergent framework to time market moves. The conversation covers why brands consistently enter cultural spaces too late, what made Carhartt's cool-by-accident trajectory so instructive, and what organizational structures most marketing teams are still missing.

July 16, 2026Episode 42226 min

UN 420 - YPulse. Gaming is Tween Culture

MaryLeigh Bliss , chief content officer at YPulse , joins Gabriella Mirabelli to discuss new research on how tweens relate to gaming. Three-quarters of 8- to 12-year-olds now call themselves gamers, a rate that matches teens, and the identity carries real weight for how brands reach this age group. Bliss and Mirabelli talk through why gaming functions as a shared culture, how virtual purchases build brand loyalty that follows kids into adulthood, and why marketers without a gaming strategy are missing the biggest channel to young consumers.

July 9, 2026Episode 41928 min

UN 419 - Thomas Bunn. The Clarity Report.

Thomas Bunn is Global Chief Client Impact Officer at Zeno Group and the architect of Clarity 2030, a study of more than 1,400 communications professionals across 10 countries. The data surfaces a striking gap: 72% of respondents expect communications to have greater influence over business strategy by 2030, but only 29% feel fully ready. Thomas and Gabriella examine what's behind that gap, whether AI transformation is a technology problem or a people problem, and why earned media has become central to how brands get discovered in an LLM-driven world.