Lindsay Smith is the moderator of our upcoming Agency Panel – Brand Differentiation: How Brands Stand Out in 2026. Prior to the event, she shared her insights on the impact of mentorship, how AI will create two distinct futures for marketers, why “this is a very unusual moment in history to be starting a career in marketing,” and more.
Catch Lindsay at BCAMA’s Annual Agency Panel taking place on March 12th from 8:00 to 10:30 a.m. at UBC Robson Square.
What role have you held, within marketing or outside, that truly shaped/influenced your marketing journey and success?
Before building Takt, I spent a lot of time operating at the intersection of technology, media, and community. One of the most formative experiences was building platforms and events that connected founders, investors, and emerging technology leaders.
It taught me something that still shapes how I approach marketing today: marketing is not just communication, it is also ecosystem design. When you understand how ideas spread, how communities form, and how influence actually works, marketing stops being about campaigns and starts becoming about momentum.
That lens still shapes how I build brands today, not just as visual systems, but as structures that help organizations build relevance, trust, and traction in the market.
What is your favourite aspect of your current role? The biggest impact you proudly make, for both
professionals within your company and clients?
For our team, the most rewarding part of my role is mentoring. When you’ve been doing something for decades, you accumulate pattern recognition that isn’t always written down anywhere. Being able to help our team shortcut years of trial and error and turn that experience into practical decision-making frameworks is incredibly fulfilling.
With clients, the part I enjoy most is helping them solve complex strategic problems. When you’re inside an organization, it can be difficult to see the structural issues clearly because you’re immersed in them every day. Coming in from the outside allows us to connect dots across strategy, brand, and market dynamics in a way that often unlocks growth that was previously felt out of reach.
The real impact comes when a brand shifts from reacting to the market to actively shaping it.
What do you see as the biggest change/disruption the marketing industry has faced in the last five years? How should marketers face it and adapt, to position themselves for success?
The biggest disruption is the acceleration of intelligence through AI and large language models. We’re entering a period where many of the tactical aspects of marketing will become increasingly automated.
That creates two very different futures for marketers.
The first group will use AI simply to produce more content faster. The second group will use it to think more strategically, test more ideas, and move faster than competitors.
The advantage will go to marketers who become directors of systems rather than executors of tasks. That means understanding strategy, human behaviour, and business dynamics deeply enough to guide AI effectively.
In other words, the future marketer is less of a “maker” and more of a conductor of intelligence.
What’s a brand you admire, and why?
One brand I admire is Notion. They’ve built an incredibly loyal following by staying very clear about what they believe in: empowering people to build systems that work the way their minds work.
What’s impressive is how consistently that philosophy shows up everywhere. In the product design, the visual identity, the community they’ve built, and even how they communicate with users. Everything reinforces the same idea of flexibility and empowerment.
It’s a good reminder that strong brands aren’t built through campaigns alone. They’re built through clarity of thinking that carries through the entire experience.
Notion reflects how strong brands operationalize their beliefs. They walk the talk.
What’s the biggest piece of advice you can give to marketers starting their career journey?
This is a very unusual moment in history to be starting a career in marketing, because for the first time, emerging marketers have near-unlimited access to knowledge, strategies, and frameworks that used to take years, sometimes decades, to accumulate through experience.
That creates a huge opportunity. The people who dive deep, absorb that knowledge quickly, and learn how to apply it with discernment will be able to accelerate their creative and strategic growth faster than any generation before them.
But there’s also a risk. AI will make it very easy to produce passable work. Average work. Lazy work. The temptation will be to mistake speed for mastery.
My advice is to resist that path. Go deep. Study strategy. Learn the layers beneath the tactic. Practice critical thinking relentlessly. And learn how to direct, train, and mentor your own AI agents so they become an extension of your thinking, not a substitute for it.
The marketers who stand out won’t be the ones who use AI to avoid the work. They’ll be the ones who use it to compound the depth of their thinking.