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March 17, 2026
When Suzy and ADWEEK renewed their partnership in April 2024 — extending the home of The Speed of Culture podcast on the ADWEEK Podcast Network through 2026 — the announcement carried a milestone buried inside its press release language: 100 episodes.
One hundred episodes of the CMO of Walmart and the CMO of McDonald's and the CMO of Visa and the CMO of e.l.f. Beauty and the VP of Marketing at Meta Reality Labs sitting across from Matt Britton to unpack, in real time, how the most important brands in the world are navigating the fastest-moving consumer environment in marketing history.
That is not a podcast. That is an archive.
It is a record of how the marketing industry has thought about culture, consumers, technology, and brand-building across a period of extraordinary disruption — through the AI inflection point, through the post-pandemic consumer reset, through the fragmentation of media and the consolidation of attention onto an ever-shorter list of formats. Every episode is a timestamp, and 100 episodes together constitute something rare in the marketing content landscape: a body of work deep enough to reveal the patterns.
The renewal through 2026 is not simply a distribution arrangement between two media brands. It is a commitment to a specific theory of how a consumer intelligence company should engage with the market it serves. And that theory — articulated in the partnership and embodied in the podcast itself — has proven more commercially sophisticated than most enterprise content strategies manage to be.
The guest roster of The Speed of Culture — Walmart CMO William White, McDonald's CMO Tariq Hassan, Visa CMO Frank Cooper III, e.l.f. Beauty CMO Kory Marchisotto, Meta Reality Labs VP of Marketing Shachar Scott, and 95 others — is not an accident. It is the product of deliberate strategic thinking about who Suzy's audience is, what they need, and how a consumer intelligence platform builds authority in a market dominated by agencies and legacy research firms.
The CMOs and marketing leaders who are Suzy's target customers are not people who respond to product feature demos and case study white papers. They are, almost by definition, people who are already thinking carefully about brand strategy, consumer behavior, and competitive positioning. They know what market research is. They have agencies. They have existing vendors. They have preferences, habits, and institutional inertia working against any new platform that tries to displace them.
What changes their behavior is not a better pitch deck. It is a better conversation — with peers who are wrestling with the same questions, at the same level of strategic complexity, in real time. The Speed of Culture creates those conversations at scale and makes them public, positioning Suzy not as a vendor selling a product but as the convener of the most important marketing conversation happening in the industry.
This is B2B content strategy operating at its most sophisticated. The average B2B podcast drives 25 to 40% of guests into active sales pipeline within 12 months, but that metric understates what a guest relationship means when the guest is the CMO of Walmart or the CMO of McDonald's. One relationship at that level does not just enter a pipeline — it reshapes the commercial landscape.
The 76% of businesses that launch podcasts explicitly for thought leadership purposes are typically thinking of thought leadership as brand positioning: being associated with interesting ideas. What Britton has built with The Speed of Culture is something more commercially precise than that. The guests are the thought leaders, and their presence on the show is itself the argument for Suzy: the world's most sophisticated marketers are willing to have this conversation with Matt Britton, which means that this conversation — and the consumer intelligence platform behind it — belongs in the company of the world's most sophisticated marketing operations.
The 100-episode milestone Britton celebrated in the April 2024 renewal announcement is not just a production achievement. It is an asset of a specific and unusual kind: a structured, searchable, cross-referenceable record of how senior marketing leaders have described consumer behavior change as it was happening.
Most documentation of market shifts is retrospective — analysts publishing research on how behavior changed after the fact, researchers measuring the lasting impacts of disruption once the disruption has settled. The Speed of Culture documents the real-time perspective: what the CMO of a Fortune 500 retailer was thinking about Gen Z purchasing behavior in early 2022, as that behavior was first becoming legible. What the marketing leader of a major QSR brand was saying about the relationship between social media and brand trust in 2023. What the VP of Marketing at one of the most forward-leaning technology companies in the world understood about the intersection of AI and consumer experience at the moment AI was first entering mainstream consumer consciousness.
That kind of real-time primary documentation is what historians and researchers usually have to reconstruct from company documents and executive memoirs years after the fact. The Speed of Culture has been capturing it as it happens, with subjects who had sufficient authority and contextual knowledge to describe what was actually occurring rather than what the press release said was occurring.
For Britton — who has built his entire career and professional brand on being the person who understands consumer culture at the speed it actually moves — this archive is the proof of concept for everything he does. The guests, by agreeing to have the conversation with him on the record, are validating the premise: that the speed of culture matters, that consumer intelligence is a strategic imperative, and that the person running this podcast is someone worth talking to.
ADWEEK's decision to renew the partnership twice — initially in 2022 and then through 2026 — reflects that validation landing with the audience. "Since The Speed of Culture published its first episode with the ADWEEK Podcast Network, host Matt Britton and his guests have provided our audience with key insights into evolving consumer trends and why they matter," said ADWEEK chief content officer Zoe Ruderman. That endorsement, from the editorial leadership of the industry's leading trade publication, is the kind of institutional credibility that money cannot buy directly and earned media cannot manufacture.
The deeper strategic logic of the Suzy/ADWEEK partnership is visible when you consider what Suzy is actually selling and what the podcast actually does.
Suzy's core value proposition to Fortune 500 brands is that consumer intelligence, delivered in real time through a vertically integrated platform, enables better marketing decisions. The argument is that brands that know what consumers actually think — continuously, in the moment, before campaigns launch rather than after they fail — outperform brands that are guessing or relying on stale research.
The Speed of Culture enacts that argument in public, week after week, episode after episode. Every conversation with a marketing leader about how their brand is reading and responding to consumer culture is a demonstration, in practice, of what it looks like to be a consumer-intelligent organization. The CMO of e.l.f. Beauty describing how the brand understood and responded to Gen Z's relationship with beauty and authenticity is not just an interesting story — it is a case study in the commercial value of genuine consumer insight, made tangible and human and specific.
This alignment between Suzy's product thesis and its content strategy is rarer than it should be in B2B marketing. The majority of enterprise content — 71% of B2B content is primarily long-form articles, white papers, and case studies — operates on a one-way broadcast model: here is what we know, here is our research, here is why you should believe us. The Speed of Culture operates on a dialogue model: here are the people who are doing the work, here is what they are actually experiencing, here is the conversation that reveals where consumer culture is going before the research reports catch up.
For a consumer intelligence platform, dialogue is the right model. Suzy's product listens to consumers. Its flagship content asset listens to CMOs. The epistemological orientation is the same in both cases: the world is changing faster than any single analyst or organization can track, and the way to stay ahead of it is to build systems for continuous listening rather than episodic measurement.
The 68% of B2B podcast listeners who say they trust companies featured on podcasts more than those advertised on other media are responding to exactly this dynamic. The podcast earns trust because it is not primarily a marketing vehicle — it is a genuine conversation with genuine stakes, and the best listeners know the difference. The Speed of Culture's guest roster, at 100 episodes of C-suite marketing leadership, makes that genuineness structural rather than incidental.
The decision to house The Speed of Culture on the ADWEEK Podcast Network rather than distribute it independently is a strategic choice that rewards scrutiny.
Independent podcasting has real advantages: complete editorial control, direct audience relationships, no revenue sharing, and the ability to build a proprietary distribution asset rather than renting space on someone else's platform. Many enterprise brands with serious content investment choose the independent path for exactly these reasons.
But The Speed of Culture's target audience — CMOs and senior marketing leaders at major consumer brands — is not primarily a podcast-discovery audience. These are not people browsing new podcast releases looking for their next listen. They are people who trust specific sources within their professional ecosystem: the publications and networks that have earned credibility with their peers over decades of industry coverage.
ADWEEK is the most established and trusted brand in marketing media. Its audience is, overwhelmingly, the audience that Suzy needs to reach. Placing The Speed of Culture on the ADWEEK Podcast Network is not a concession of independence — it is a recognition that distribution into a trusted professional community is worth more than platform ownership when the target audience is as specific and trust-dependent as Fortune 500 marketing leadership.
The proof is in the renewal. A two-year extension announced in April 2024, running through 2026, is not the behavior of a platform relationship that is merely adequate. It is the behavior of a distribution partnership that is working — delivering the right audience, at the right scale, with the right institutional validation.
B2B podcast production has increased by over 45% in the last two years, and the proliferation creates its own problem: a crowded landscape where undifferentiated shows compete for a finite pool of senior marketing attention. The ADWEEK imprimatur — the implicit endorsement of association with the industry's publication of record — is one of the most effective differentiation signals available in that crowded landscape. It tells the CMO who is deciding whether to spend an hour listening to a conversation about consumer culture: this one matters.
The answer lives in the target audience and the nature of the purchasing decision. CMOs and senior marketing leaders at Fortune 500 brands are not influenced by display advertising or inbound content SEO. They trust their professional network, the publications that have served their industry for decades, and the conversations that their peers are willing to have publicly. A podcast that puts Suzy's CEO in genuine dialogue with the CMOs of Walmart, McDonald's, and Visa, on the record, on a platform trusted by the entire marketing industry, generates a form of institutional credibility that no paid channel can replicate. It is B2B brand-building operating at the level of the audience's actual trust infrastructure.
The differentiation runs along two dimensions. First, the guest caliber: the consistent ability to attract CMOs from the world's largest consumer brands is not a production achievement — it reflects the genuine standing of Britton as a consumer culture expert and the institutional credibility of the ADWEEK partnership. Second, the underlying thesis: the show is not organized around marketing tactics or agency case studies, but around the question of how brands understand and respond to consumer culture as it evolves. That thesis is both genuinely interesting to the target audience and directly aligned with Suzy's commercial proposition. The podcast and the platform are pursuing the same argument from different angles.
ADWEEK's audience — the marketing and advertising industry's most senior decision-makers — gets consistent access to conversations with their peers about the strategic questions they are actually wrestling with. In a media environment where executive attention is scarce and trust is the primary currency of professional content, a show that reliably delivers CMO-level insight on the speed of consumer culture change is a genuine audience asset. The ADWEEK chief content officer's framing in the renewal announcement — "key insights into evolving consumer trends and why they matter" — reflects a publication that has found, in the partnership, a content asset that serves its audience's actual intelligence needs rather than just its ambient interest in industry news.
One hundred episodes builds something that no single piece of content can create and that money cannot buy directly: trust at scale, demonstrated over time, with an audience that is sophisticated enough to recognize the difference between performed authority and earned authority. The 100-episode archive of The Speed of Culture is simultaneously a credential — proof that the most important people in marketing believe this conversation is worth having — and a resource, a searchable record of how senior marketing leadership has thought about consumer culture through one of the most disruptive periods in the industry's history. Both dimensions compound: each new episode adds to the archive and borrows credibility from it simultaneously.
When Matt Britton launched The Speed of Culture on the ADWEEK Podcast Network in 2022, the premise was a bet on a specific kind of content: not analysis of what had happened to consumers, but conversation with the people who were navigating what was happening to consumers in real time.
One hundred episodes and a two-year renewal later, that bet has proven correct — not because podcasts are universally effective for enterprise brands, but because this specific podcast, with this specific guest architecture, on this specific platform, embodies a theory of consumer intelligence that Suzy's product also embodies. The show does not just market the platform. It demonstrates why the platform matters.
The CMO who listens to a conversation between Britton and the marketing leader of a brand they admire, about a consumer trend they are trying to understand, is experiencing in audio form what Suzy is promising to deliver in data: the sense that someone is tracking the speed of culture with enough care, depth, and rigor to be genuinely useful to the people whose brands depend on it.
The renewal through 2026 means that conversation continues. More guests, more episodes, more evidence of what it looks like when a brand takes consumer intelligence seriously as a commercial discipline rather than a compliance exercise.
For the CMOs, brand strategists, and marketing leaders who want to stay ahead of the consumer trends driving their business, The Speed of Culture podcast is where those conversations live. And for a deeper exploration of the generational shift that is reshaping every consumer intelligence challenge brands face — the emergence of Generation AI, the first cohort to grow up with artificial intelligence as a native feature of their consumer psychology — Generation AI is the essential companion.