Welcome to the first episode of season two of The Digital Edge, hosted by Mark Reed-Edwards.
In this episode of The Digital Edge, Michael Ossendrijver, Chief Growth Officer at Incubeta, explores the shift from theoretical AI adoption to practical, outcomes-driven integration. From “hacking” workflows to the rise of agentic commerce, Michael breaks down how leaders can maintain a human edge as AI reshapes the marketing landscape.
Read the Full Transcript Here
Mark Reed-Edwards: This is The Digital Edge from Incubeta. I’m Mark Reed Edwards. This podcast is about how you can balance technology and humanity. How, as AI eats the world, you can integrate efficiency with empathy. We’ll talk with leaders from Incubeta and across the industry as we traverse the digital edge into tomorrow’s world.
On today’s episode, we’re joined by Michael Ossendrijver. Michael is Chief Growth Officer at Incubeta, where he says he’s changing the marketing world, one machine at a time. Michael, welcome to The Digital Edge.
Michael Ossendrijver: Thank you.
Mark Reed-Edwards: You’ve been at Incubeta for some time now. Can you tell me about your career path and how you came to the company?
Michael Ossendrijver: Actually, this is the only job I’ve ever had, Mark. I’m in my early forties now. I started selling ringtones online when I was 16. So it’s been a while. And then from selling ringtones at 16, starting a performance marketing network, merging that over a series of mergers, acquisitions, and a whole lot of other adventures, jump ahead quite a few years later, and I’m still here.
So this is all I know and I jokingly say that I’ve never had a real job in my life – that’s how much I love what I do. I guess I’m one of the people who truly loves and gets excited by digital marketing, not just as a profession, but as what it truly is, what it stands for, and what it represents.
What I truly like about Incubeta as a business is how dynamic it is, how great our people are, how much value we add for clients. And what I like about the industry is how fast it moves. This whole AI revolution that’s taking place right now gives an entirely new spin on things. And, look, for me intellectually, that’s massively exciting. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s mostly just a lot of fun, Mark.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Oh, that’s good to have a job. That’s fun, right?
Michael Ossendrijver: Right? I think so.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I’ll start out with a really big question. How do you set yourself up to have a digital edge?
Michael Ossendrijver: I like doing things, right? I believe you need to be a good practitioner of things to be able to talk and advise clients strategically in how to leverage certain things. I am a doer. I’m a tinker. I’m somebody who likes to optimize workflows, processes, hack systems, hack workflows, come up with smarter things, tinker around in platforms. That is what gives me an edge. Often I sit in rooms with people who haven’t done that, and I’m like, “Guys, you’re missing out.” How can you talk about certain things without actually knowing how some of the intricacies work?
It doesn’t mean I know how every bell and whistle in Google or in Meta works, right? That’s not the case anymore. But understanding it from a level of having worked in the platforms, understanding it from a level of having tinkered with these things is incredibly important. And again with AI – and I promise I won’t use the word AI in every sentence – but, specifically with how transformative AI is to our clients, to ourselves, to our industry, but also toward humanity as a whole, just getting stuck in how these things work and operate and how they change how we operate as people and how our workflows adapt and evolve. It’s just doing things, Mark. My digital edge is just doing things, if that makes sense.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, and there are so many people that haven’t actually done the thing they’re advising their clients on. So actually, kind of digging in and doing the work that you’re advising your clients to do is an edge for you.
Michael Ossendrijver: And again, that’s also fun, right? I think it’s a lot more fun to advise clients around stuff that truly makes sense because you know how it makes sense versus just talking about it, right? That’s how I see it.
Mark Reed-Edwards: It’s the difference between theory and practice.
Michael Ossendrijver: A hundred percent that, yes.
Mark Reed-Edwards: You mentioned AI several times already, and that brings me to my next question, which is: What do you think of the state of the industry today with AI as a backdrop and everything else that’s going on in the world as a backdrop?
Michael Ossendrijver: It’s hard to get not philosophical on a question like that. Honestly, I think people who think AI will go away or the impact will be minimized or it’s just a bubble, I think that’s a bit of a misguided way of thinking, right?
Ultimately, a lot of the work that we do will absolutely be revolutionized because of what AI can offer us, right? But that means a lot of the workflows, ways of working, a lot of the traditional agency business models and, to be honest, a lot of the digital strategies of our clients, they’re old news, right?
I see a lot of our peer set try to evolve their existing business models in AI, building a lot of different agents that all do a little role that currently happens within the agency. I think that’s a horrible idea.
Let’s rethink. Let’s truly rethink how a world works, where we can be a digital marketing partner to our clients that’s truly doing things differently. For me, AI allows our people, but also our clients, to truly focus on what’s important, versus tasks, if you get what I mean.
And I love the idea of freeing myself up, but freeing our clients up and freeing our teams up from doing really tedious tasks and focusing on the larger strategic challenges, the bigger creative ideas, the smarter execution of certain things, versus doing a lot of manual work. What I see for myself, playing around, tinkering with AI, truly trying to stretch it: it’s the best friend I’ve never had. It’s fantastic to just have AI work with you as you’re working on a pitch, as you’re iterating an idea yourself, as you’re planning a holiday. All of that stuff, it’s just fantastic.
It’s always there for you to speak to, and it’s always there to help you shape and polish your own ideas better. But still the idea, the steering, the input, is very much human-based, right? And I don’t believe that’s going to go away anytime soon. But the weapon of AI, the power it gives you to hypercharge those ideas quickly, to turn them into something really fast, that’s totally coming, unshackled.
The speed at which things move is absolutely insane. But yeah, it’s going to have big implications in how we work as an agency, how we make money, how our clients look at us, how we look at our clients, how our clients build their teams. It’s all going upside down, Mark, and I’m excited for it. I’m scared for it, but I’m also here for it.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, that interaction between you and whatever AI tool you use is something that isn’t really talked that much about because it is a chat, right? It’s “Hey, I need help with this, or can you tell me something about this?” And then you get whatever they feed you and you say, “Yeah, that’s interesting but how about if you look at it from this point of view?” And it becomes a back and forth. Anybody who accepts something that’s fed to them right out of AI and uses that right off the bat, that’s not the magic of AI. The magic of AI is fine-tuning that idea in a back and forth.
Michael Ossendrijver: Spot on. And let’s be honest, if you’re getting a professional service from someone, you have a dialogue with someone, right? You say exactly the right thing, you have this ongoing dialogue with AI and AI will shape my thoughts and I will shape the AI with my own input based on that.
And you have a conversation with each other. And that’s what I love about AI. I can pick up the conversation at any moment in time. I can have a really good 30, 45-minute session with Gemini, building this canvas out on a certain idea or strategy that I have. I can go do a whole bunch of other things and I can pick up the conversation whenever I want.
That feels great. I don’t have to email somebody, I don’t have to schedule a meeting. I don’t have to find time. It’s all on my own terms and that’s fantastic. Again, these are really basic things when you speak about them like that. But they revolutionize how we do business and they also revolutionize how we operate as people in terms of how we gather information, how we process information, what we do with that information. Just like the introduction of the internet did. It’s exactly the same for me. And it also means that the rules are getting reshuffled, the winners and losers are getting reshuffled, and that’s, like I said, it’s exciting and scary at the same time.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I look at November of 2022, when ChatGPT was first released, as an inflection point, not just for business, but for society. The capabilities that are available in generative AI, which keep getting more advanced, can change your business life, change your life in general. Instead of the internet, it feels almost like the iPhone introduction, where suddenly you were able to take this power with you wherever you went.
The introduction of the internet was almost iterative. It existed and then the web came along, but it was a slow burn in the mid-nineties. And then the dot-com bubble blew up. But the iPhone was just like a seismic event.
And I think that’s similar to the way AI is. It’s like everybody knows what generative AI is now. Whether they use it the right way or whether they really know how to use it isn’t the point. But it’s this kind of societal impact that it’s had.
Michael Ossendrijver: Correct. And I think what you say is an important thing. I think lots of people don’t really know how to use it. I think lots of people are afraid. I think lots of people take what AI produces at face value, and that’s very dangerous. Just like people can be wrong, I would say AI can be wrong and it can be very convincingly wrong.
And that’s scary, quite frankly. I think, like I said, the dialogue between AI and human and how you drive value out of that. Look, no one’s told people how to do that, right? People are just starting using ChatGPT, and you’re off to the races and it’s easy. But how do you truly validate that information?
How do you play around with it? How do you tinker with it? It’s incredibly important because AI is able to make a bad idea sound very convincing. And if you take that at face value and you don’t question it, that’s a slippery slope you end up being on. And we do this for clients all the time.
For me, when we’re workshopping with a client, when we’re doing these things, it’s really solid input AI can give. But it’s input, right? It’s not necessarily true. It’s not the end goal. But does it give you really good inspirational ideas or topics or angles to speak to?
Absolutely. It’s the best sparring partner I could have ever wished for, Mark.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. I want to talk about tomorrow’s world. Can you share your outlook for 2026?
Michael Ossendrijver: For me, it’s hard to time-capture that on an annual basis. I think, how do I say that? I think we’ll have a boring 2026.
Mark Reed-Edwards: That sounds good actually, doesn’t it?
Michael Ossendrijver: Yes. I like a boring year, to be honest. I’m ready for one. No pandemics, no crazy things. Just a nice, good little boring year. I can take that. Now, what I mean with that is:
Look, a lot of our clients are obsessed with the shiny object, right? We show them the transformative power, not just of AI, but about how the entire ecosystem is changing and converging.
And a lot of our clients don’t have their house in order, right? They don’t have the right data infrastructure. Their systems are not connected the right way. Their teams are completely scattered, right? The creative team and the media team hate each other. Yet there’s a CMO expecting a nice cohesive approach on generative AI, media automation, and creative insights coming together.
When I look at the work we do for our clients, but also as a business, we’re really in the scene-setting stage, so to say, and those are the boring basics that we need to do for clients. It’s really setting our clients up to start doing the cool stuff and getting them on the journey to get there.
But the journey to glory tends to start with a pretty boring first mile you need to walk, if you know what I mean. And that’s where we find a lot of our clients. And that’s really impactful stuff down the line. But like I said, getting these foundations in place to truly excel and to truly drive value, I see that as a lot of the work we do with clients and that allows us to be transformative for them.
When that base doesn’t exist, we operate in tiny silos with clients, right? We do a tiny POC and the POC might work, it might not work. How do you truly drive value? How do you truly scale that up? How do you make your POC a business-as-usual way of working? That’s incredibly difficult when data infrastructures aren’t in place, when teams aren’t aligned, when ways of working – us with our clients – but also how clients work amongst themselves haven’t changed. So the long yards of AI actually sit in the transformation that our clients need to go through, from a data perspective, a systems perspective, a ways of working perspective, not even in what the AI can do, if you get what I mean.
I call that boring. I guess a lot of management consultants would call it very exciting actually. But that’s where I see a lot of the work with clients. At the same time, with some of our clients who lean in differently with us and who might be further on the journey with some of the stuff they’re doing, it can be a really transformative year.
We’re hypercharging a lot of the work we do across our creative portfolio leveraging AI not in a way, “Okay, it’s AI, it’s cheaper.” I don’t care about that. And I don’t want our clients to necessarily think that we’re correlating AI with cheaper work or less people. It’s about amplifying impact, right? And the clients who get that are the ones we can move along.
The moment our clients understand that the fact that we’re leveraging synthetic models or synthetic cars or synthetic backdrops in the assets that we build for them that allow them to not have to make a choice on one product you show, or two products you show, or three products you show and what model holds which product, right?
That world’s totally gone. You can have unlimited models holding unlimited products, doing unlimited things. If you build your creative structure up in such a way that it can take all of these elements in as modular pieces, right? Making sure those pieces can be targeted to the right audience, making sure the validation of that audience and that model exists, making sure you’re measuring all of these different modules appropriately for impact, you can do crazy, cool stuff.
And we’re starting to scratch the surface with clients. We have some who run very fast with us at this. We have some who run very slow with us at this. Every client has their own tempo, but there’s just such a transformative force.
But the transformative force ends up really reinforcing what we do in terms of data analysis for clients. It ends up reinforcing how we run their media. It ends up reinforcing how we bring that whole ecosystem together. But the accelerants are absolutely there and that’s super exciting, I think for next year.
And I can’t wait to see all the great work we’ll produce in that sense because there’s some really cool stuff coming.
Mark Reed-Edwards: So let me sum it up. A boring year of doing amazing stuff.
Michael Ossendrijver: That’s good. I like that. Yeah. You’re a lot more succinct with words than I am, Mark.
Mark Reed-Edwards: So if I’m a marketer and I listen to what you just said, and I’m looking ahead to the rest of 2026, what are the big changes that I need to have on my radar?
Michael Ossendrijver: It’s a good question. I think what I would have on my radar as a marketer is a need to experiment and to understand what’s happening. I think we have clients who are almost paralyzed in the face of change, if you get what I mean. And that’s dangerous.
So I think having a proper culture of experimentation, but also understanding how these experiments and testing ends up in a larger roadmap of actually driving organizational change. That’s a really important piece that marketers need to tackle and that ties into how you do creative. It ties into how you run your marketing and things. It ties into how you speak to your audiences and how you figure out using synthetic audience panels or other pieces, what your audiences will resonate with, right? So there’s this element of, I think, positive experimentation that’s really important.
I hate to say the word because we talk about silos so much in our industry, but the disruptive force of AI is to truly make that disappear.
As a marketer, I would want to have a conversation with my agency. And that conversation needs to be seamless across media, across creative, and across data. I don’t want to have these isolated conversations because in the end, that’s not going to help me as a marketer, right? This stuff needs to really be cohesive. It needs to be really integrated. It needs to really come together.
That’s hard, right? Many of our clients have different creative agencies, different media agencies, creative and media teams who might not like each other. They have different media teams for above the line, below the line. They have different creative agencies for above the line, below the line.
They have a measurement agency. They have different media agencies doing different things. That entire infrastructure I’m just describing to you, that’s going to be the factor that’s going to hold marketers down so incredibly much in terms of finding pace, finding acceleration, and truly embracing things.
So those are just ways of working and I think, like I said, ecosystems like that are really going to be cracking at the seams. It’s going to be incredibly difficult to get the right output out of that. And I think that means that the entire industry for marketers, for specialists like us, for everybody, it’s going to go through a lot of change.
Can I predict what a change looks like? Can I tell marketers what to do there? Not really, but start with what you can control as a marketer, start bringing the thinking together more. Start being more curious. If you sit in media, be curious around creative. If you sit in data, don’t just think it’s about measuring website sessions or measuring incrementality across media.
What about the creative signals that come into play there? And if you’re a marketing guy, try to truly think about the true bottom line impact, the true business profitability that you’re driving from a marketing perspective versus just a little performance metric that might sit in your OKRs or sit in the platform that you’re looking at.
Mark Reed-Edwards: And data can be a creative thing too. That’s the beauty of data. You can use that to charge you up creatively.
Michael Ossendrijver: It should, right? If you think about the end game that we’re in, Mark, to describe it like that, the direction of travel that Meta and Google have taken in terms of automating media, that’s not going to go away, right? So leveraging data to drive better media outcomes, it’s going to happen and it’s going to stay accurate.
But the platforms will do a lot of that lift themselves, right? Where do we go? Where do we evolve? We evolve into feeding those machines with high-quality signals, high-quality business data that’s ready to perform. And to your point, creative ideas that bring that stuff to life, right? That’s really where the difference will sit.
And for me, it’s crazy that there’s such a big gap between creative ideas and understanding the data and the performance behind that. These are different worlds with our clients, and it shouldn’t be the case. It just shouldn’t be.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Because the consumer of whatever marketing doesn’t distinguish between anything. They just see whatever you deliver to them.
Michael Ossendrijver: The consumer only cares about what they see, right? They don’t care about the targeting or the audience strategy or what segment they’re in. They care about what is the marketing message they’re seeing, and they’ll choose to respond to that. And most of the time they won’t respond to that. So they’ll look at it as intrusive and annoying.
Let’s not forget that. So you’re completely right. And sometimes we forget that, right, in our targeting and all of the jargon and all of the technology that we have around us, I think you distill it really well.
What are consumers seeing? How are they engaging with it? And how can you be more relevant in what you show consumers?
I don’t believe in one-on-one marketing. I think one-on-one marketing is overrated. What I do believe in is tailoring the right message to the right moment in the right context. I do believe in that and a lot of brands, yeah, there’s massive improvement they can and should unlock over this year.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Does it come down to a lack of respect sometimes for the consumer that it’s almost like the last thing some people think about when they’re putting a marketing program together. It’s more about their OKRs and all the things they have to worry about internally, which groups are involved. And then it’s “Oh, this gets presented to a consumer.”
Michael Ossendrijver: “Oh, we had somebody we wanted to communicate something to.” Oh, yeah. This is an afterthought. No, I hear you. It’s actually a good point. I think we haven’t necessarily done ourselves the best service as an industry by introducing all of these different slices of technology and layers and words and people and roles and functions.
I think maybe we’ve overcomplicated things a little bit. But you’re right. I think a lot of marketers can get lost in process and collaboration internally and externally with their agency and deliverables and timelines and assets and media planning and strategy. What are you truly communicating?
And I believe that AI is going to unshackle us from a lot of those steps to truly focus on the big creative ideas. Because they’re not going to go away. The big ideas matter. The good ideas matter a lot. And that is what a lot of the focus will go into.
I think being more creative and not necessarily just building pretty pictures and creating pretty videos, but also creative in the audiences, creative in the products that you sell them, creative in how you package these products up the right way.
If you look at what Google is introducing in terms of AI-enhanced commerce, we work for a lot of retail clients and they’re in for a wild ride with how consumers are going to change their entire purchase patterns.
Trust me, gone are the days where consumers go to your website to buy something. That’s going away and it’s going to go away really fast, and it’s going to go to a conclusion on who owns the customer. Who owns the checkout experience? How can you be relevant in a checkout ecosystem or purchase ecosystem that you don’t own? How can you stand out?
Those are big challenges and no one has solved them yet. That’s what’s ahead of us.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, zero-click search is fundamentally changing the function of a website.
Michael Ossendrijver: Yep.
Mark Reed-Edwards: And the old argument about, should you gate content or not, gate content is a moot point now because I find out everything on whatever gen AI tool I use.
Michael Ossendrijver: Exactly. The website almost becomes the last thing you do, right, versus the first thing you do.
At the moment Gemini knows the type of sizes of clothing I like, the type of shoes I want to buy, the type of travel I like, right? Those models will hold so much of my consumer preference, if you get what I mean. And let’s be honest, that’s the moat that these AI models will have in the future, right?
What they know about me and how they’re bringing that as an auction-esque system to suppliers who want to offer me something, right? That’s how it’s going to be. That whole rule book is changing. And are we ready for that as a business? No. Are our clients ready for that?
Absolutely not. Are we ready for that as people? I think the consumers might get there first, if you get what I mean. Mark, that’s the exciting piece, right? This is driven by changing consumer behavior and consumers finding faster and more efficient ways of doing things versus as an industry telling people to change.
I think certain business models might not exist in the future. If you think about agentic commerce, do you need a website to sell a product? Now, online, you cannot sell a product without a website.
I’m telling you, in two years, you and I can sell products online at scale, doing really well without having a website. Sounds fun.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I could talk about this for hours, but I’ve got a couple more questions I want to ask you. And these are about Michael, the person. And to wrap up the whole story, can you give me an example of when you failed and how it changed your life?
Michael Ossendrijver: That’s a good question. How it changed my life, that’s a big one, Mark.
Look, there’s a few things I’ve learned and they sound like a cliché, so I apologize if they do, but they’re true. I’ve learned that intuition is incredibly important in business.
If something doesn’t feel right, it generally isn’t right. In terms of decisions, in terms of people, in terms of lots of things. I’ve learned to listen to that a lot more as I’ve grown a tiny bit older and hopefully a tiny bit wiser.
I’ve also learned to try things faster and to also allow things to fail faster, if you get what I mean.
And again, these are rules and these are statements that exist for a reason. Look, you could, and this is in my private life as well as in my business life, I could come up with 50 reasons not to do something. If you have two reasons to do it, how about you try it out and how about you be critical of how things work and you see how it goes, right?
And I think that open mindset is a really helpful thing to have specifically in a state of change and flux in which our industry is. And also being able to pull the plug and failing fast is incredibly important, right?
I’d rather test something and have it go wrong quickly and say that’s a lesson learned versus not doing it because I’m afraid it’s going to fail, or starting it and then being incredibly afraid of ending it quickly because we decided to start it, right?
So I think the element of being really agile and thinking there is something I haven’t always done. And those are expensive lessons. If you wait too long with things, in terms of money, in terms of stress, in terms of lots of different things, Mark. So that’s probably something I would highlight.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, there’s a quote attributed to Winston Churchill: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” So it’s continuing whether you succeed or fail.
Michael Ossendrijver: Yeah. And lots of things fail, and that’s also okay if things fail, as long as you learn.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah. So with this as a backdrop, if you could share one piece of hard-earned wisdom you’ve learned over your career, what would it be?
Michael Ossendrijver: That’s a good question. It ties in with this magnificent quote you just gave. I mean, it’s, try things, and I guess what I mean with that, it also draws back to what we discussed all the way at the beginning. Go into things.
Don’t be afraid of getting your hands dirty and really operationalizing things. Dive into things to truly understand them. Have a certain obsession with wanting to understand how the world works and operates. That’s more a general feeling and a general modus operandi that I have, Mark.
So it doesn’t truly only relate to digital marketing. But ultimately that’s what it is. Curiosity is an incredibly important virtue to have. Curiosity leads to experimentation, curiosity leads to innovation, and curiosity really leads to moving things forward.
And again, in my private life, that’s the case. In my business life, that’s the case. And I try to do that with our clients where I can as well. Let’s be curious about this stuff. Let’s test it out. Let’s do it.
The same answer as I gave you to the last question, but for me they’re very related to each other.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, keep an open mind.
Michael Ossendrijver: Yes. And keep an open mind and challenge yourself. A wise person in our business always says, “It’s important to hold strong opinions, but hold them loosely.” And I love that saying, right? And that’s if I would need to give a word of wisdom, which is not my own, that’s the word of wisdom I would give.
That’s really a mantra I live by. And I think that’s solid.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Michael, thank you so much for joining me on the Digital Edge today and for sharing your view of tomorrow’s world. This was a wonderful conversation.
Michael Ossendrijver: You are very welcome. This was fun.
Mark Reed-Edwards: What a great discussion with Michael. Lots to think about and lots to take with us as we tackle 2026. I’m left with this: 2026 is the boring year of doing amazing things. Let’s get out there and get going.
On the next Digital Edge, I’ll be joined by Jonathan Greene, Co-Founder and CEO of RocketSource by Incubeta, a growth-focused digital consultancy that helps enterprises unlock customer lifetime value through the fusion of behavioral science, data intelligence, and AI-powered experiences.
We’ll dig more into AI, architecture, and exactly what decision-makers need to be thinking about. That’s on the next Digital Edge.
I’m Mark Reed Edwards. I hope you can join us then.
Speakers: Host: Mark Reed-Edwards; Guest: Michael Ossendrijver, Chief Solutions Officer, Incubeta.