RH

Roger Hurni

Things Roger Says on Podcasts

Runs Off Madison Ave, a behavioral marketing agency he co-founded whose clients have included Nike, PetSmart, Wells Fargo and P.F. Chang's. His work applies behavioral science to advertising decisions, using data to test what actually changes audience behavior. He wrote the book Outthink. Outperform., contributes to Forbes Agency Council, and appears on Embracing Marketing Mistakes arguing that how deeply someone questions AI output matters more than how quickly they adopt the tool.

Where to Find Them

Roger Hurni has been a guest on The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics and Embracing Marketing Mistakes .

Recently: “EP 124: He Built His Own AI Company Then Shut It Down” on Embracing Marketing Mistakes (August 2026); “405. How to Outthink and Outperform in Marketing w/ Roger Hurni” on The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics (June 2024).

What They Said

“the person who just throws everything into ChatGTP and then puts out this very confident, polished report, even if it's wrong, is not the valuable person.” — Roger Hurni, Embracing Marketing Mistakes

Roger Hurni was explaining why he doesn't think AI levels the playing field between employees. He argues that whoever pushes back on the AI's output, rather than accepting a confident-sounding answer at face value, is the one worth investing in.

Embracing Marketing Mistakes · 2026-08-18 Permalink → Listen →
Embracing Marketing Mistakes Around 29:10 into the episode
Roger Hurni

…and having it help me organize. So I would love to have it finished by the end of this year. And then if it comes out by the end of next year, it's probably just the publishing world just takes a long time to get through all that stuff. So I would definitely like it to come out next year sometime.

Speaker 1

…that you've used, I think Will talked about earlier. Expensive sameness. Are you talking about the fact that everybody will be producing stuff using the same tools? So everything will be vanilla. So all the same, but you've paid a lot of money to do it. Is that the point you're making with that?

Roger Hurni

…then you need to have some other element that makes someone better than the other person. You guys have employees, right? Someone comes into your organization or you've got two employees, both with the same number of years' experience, basically the same background, and they have the same access to AI tools, who's the better person? It's going to be the one who asks the better questions. Because the person who just throws everything into ChatGTP and then puts out this very confident, polished report, even if it's wrong, is not the valuable person. It's the person who comes back with that messier document, the handwritten notes in the margins. The person who's like, hey, I didn't like these couple of answers, so I dug deeper. And I went back to the research and I found this that it didn't flag. And that's the person who's going to be the critical thinker. And that's the person you want to invest in. And in a few years, those two groups of…

Speaker 3

And I suppose those people would always, those curious people that ask the right questions that are driven, irrespective of when they practiced in their profession, pre-AI, post-AI, they're always going to rise to the top, aren't they? You know, whatever technology they've got at their means, you…

Roger Hurni

Yeah. But I mean, you don't want someone who just mindlessly pumps out a press before AI. You wouldn't want someone who mindlessly pumps out a press release, crosses the T's dot line, hands it in without critical thinking behind it. It's just AI has just removed those social barriers, that social…

Speaker 3

It's a tricky, I mean, back to this transitionary period we're in. It's tricky, isn't it? Because at the moment, there is a clear advantage of people that use AI, irrespective of how critical they're thinking. So it gives them an immediate kind of leg up, doesn't it? Just by virtue of using it. But…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“the future doesn't belong to people who use AI the fastest. It belongs to people who use it the deepest” — Roger Hurni, Embracing Marketing Mistakes

Roger Hurni, a behavioral marketing agency founder, was discussing how AI adoption is unfolding across industries. His point was that speed of adoption matters less than the depth of thinking someone brings to using the tool.

Embracing Marketing Mistakes · 2026-08-18 Permalink → Listen →
Embracing Marketing Mistakes Around 22:52 into the episode
Roger Hurni

…not specificity, right? We're not saying, oh, we use it to create an ad at this stage, right? Or we use it to create the writing of a press release or even a draft of a press release. We never talk about that. We may, we may not. It's the context around how we use AI that's the philosophy document.

Speaker 3

…AI. You can tell they've not been scrutinized at all. We've identified AI copy on one of the major ad magazines in the UK come through on an email. And I think it's pretty widespread at the moment. Is this, I know there's a term you use, expensive sameness. Is this what we're talking about here?

Roger Hurni

…now, you're going to have people who understand this technology can be incredibly powerful and use it in ways that you never thought of. I mean, the desktop computer was like that. IBM's like, why do we need, why does people, why do people need a computer on their desk? They just did, they didn't understand that the future is, you know, for our, in our, in our time frame that we're in right now, the future doesn't belong to people who use AI the fastest. It belongs to people who use it the deepest, right? The ones who question more, the ones who don't have it replace their judgment. There's a place in the world for AI, just like there's a place in the world for calculators and computers, and they replace the side rule and the abacus and all those other things. We're adopting a new technology and we're going through the growing pains of adopting that new technology. But at the end of that…

Speaker 3

How long have we got to go then? How much more pain have we got to get through before we get to that point?

Roger Hurni

If I had that answer, I would be a gazillionaire. I

Speaker 3

think. Yeah, it's a few more months here, I reckon.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode