AI, Creative, and Incrementality: What Avinash Kaushik Wants Every Marketer to Do Differently Right Now

CommerceNext’s keynote with Avinash Kaushik, now advising on brand strategy and marketing transformation at Tapestry, wasn’t theoretical. It was an urgent set of imperatives.

In conversation with Pooja Chandiramani, VP of Media Strategy at Coach, Kaushik laid out what marketers must do now to drive real performance: embrace AI-powered media, treat creative as a business risk, and stop using the word “incrementality” without structure or action.

Kaushik framed AI readiness in three buckets: adopt now, experiment cautiously, and avoid entirely (for now). His strongest recommendation? Use what already works. Tools like Meta Advantage+ and Google AI-powered campaigns are already outperforming manual efforts, if teams are willing to use them properly.

This shift isn’t just technical. It’s cultural. The real unlock, he argued, will come from HR, not IT. Organizations must reduce punishment for failed tests, support reskilling, and audit every new hire decision through an AI-first lens.

Kaushik gave this as a starting point: before opening a new headcount, ask what portion of the work could be done by AI. Even if the answer is only 30%, that mindset shift matters.

Kaushik’s clearest warning was around SEO. In his words: the “ten blue links” are disappearing. Search behavior is shifting from click-based navigation to AI-generated answers. That changes how brands should think about organic visibility and what “optimization” actually means.

The most overlooked risk? AI-generated search summaries (from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s new overviews) are no longer learning from your website. They’re drawing from third-party content over 70–90% of brand representation now comes from sources you don’t control.

The mandate: brands must rethink content strategy across external sites, not just owned channels. If SEO traffic drops by 80%, Kaushik asked, would you know how to recover?

Kaushik admitted creative effectiveness was underrepresented in his own earlier work. Now, he sees it differently: 60–70% of marketing impact comes from creative quality.

That’s why teams at Coach, Kate Spade, and other Tapestry brands pretest major campaign concepts across markets before scaling. It’s not just to save media dollars, it’s to inform what to make in the first place. When testing reveals what resonates in Tokyo but not New York, adjustments happen early, not post-mortem.

He acknowledged that pretesting isn’t feasible for every execution especially when producing 300+ assets for TikTok-scale environments. But for flagship campaigns, it’s non-negotiable. The combination of prevalidated creative concepts with agile testing at scale, he argued, is the real advantage.

Kaushik was direct: incrementality is overused, misunderstood, and often misapplied. The key is to operationalize it at three levels:

This layered view doesn’t just guide better planning. It arms CMOs to answer the most important budget question of all: If we turned off all marketing tomorrow, when would the business feel it?

For Kaushik, the best marketing teams make their CFOs “bulletproof.” That means every budget pitch includes two numbers: incremental revenue driven by marketing, and cost per incremental sale.

Kaushik closed with a four-part challenge for marketers, anchored in deadlines, not theory:

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