Brand & Creative Direction Lead

Wyndham and goop are using AI to scale creative and avoid burnout. Thursday, March 26th, 2026 - 9:00 am AI marketing platforms are everywhere these days. What many are missing, though, is the ability to quickly generate and revise creative based on performance. For hotel franchise Wyndham, the most important performance metrics are cost per acquisition and click-through rate, said Michael Shiwdin, who leads guest engagement, loyalty and strategic partnerships. On Thursday, Wyndham announced a partnership with Adora, an AI performance marketing platform that automates ad testing and optimization, scales creative assets and provides real-time feedback on campaign performance. Wyndham first ran a pilot with Adora last year to recruit new users for its loyalty program. Who's flying the plane? According to Andrew Double, VP of revenue at Adora, the platform syncs with an advertiser's existing measurement systems (often through Adobe and/or Meta) to provide running feedback throughout a campaign. It also defers to the advertiser's KPIs. "We don't have our own metrics," said Double. The advertiser should always remain "the controller of the brand," he added, which is why Adora relies on each client's own preferred "truth source" and works closely with their creative team to ensure the content is in line with the brand's vision and adheres to any restrictions. In Wyndham's case, the brand submitted assets to Adora, including preexisting creative and property photos, from which Adora's AI model created dozens of potential ad variants. Wyndham's creative team was able to provide feedback to the model to help train it on the brand's preferred aesthetic and style. For one recent campaign, Wyndham ran more than 90 creative variants, said Shiwdin. The campaign targeted 15 different audiences, which received different creatives based on traits like financial habits and preferred travel destinations. For instance, business travelers who are likely to be more interested in Wyndham's full-service hotels and resorts were served ads depicting beachfront properties with messaging about the value of loyalty programs, whereas potential road trippers saw ads for economy brands like Days Inn with messaging related to spontaneity. At one point, Adora's AI determined that beach imagery performed 23% better than food and beverage imagery for a specific audience segment. Adora automatically refined the campaign so the ads with higher engagement ran with greater frequency. Wyndham's performance marketing and account management teams also monitor performance in real time, Shiwdin added, so they can make manual adjustments to targeting and distribution. Without simultaneous access to real-time insights and creative optimization, making mid-campaign refinements is "incredibly difficult," he said. Closing the loop. Wyndham opted to work with Adora over some of its competitors because Adora's product is "much more horizontal," said Shiwdin. Many similar companies have two distinct products, he said: one for creative generation and one for paid media optimization. When creative generation and media optimization occur in one place, there's increased efficiency for both the marketing team and the product team. Adora's tools also allow brands to cast a wider net when designing creative. Most advertisers "can't do photo shoots in every single city within the United States," said Double, so if they're based in San Francisco, for example, most of their photoshoots will probably be there, too. But now, if a brand indicates that it wants to target people in, say, Savannah, Georgia, the AI can revise an existing ad with an accurate portrayal of Savannah in the background. Fixing a sticky situation. The "horizontal" approach has also been a draw for other marketers, including wellness and lifestyle brand goop, another of Adora's clients. Goop's creative team had previously been "under a lot of pressure" to produce a large number of creative assets for its paid media strategy, said CMO Alexa Ritacco. The "sheer number of iterations" that the brand needed to test was becoming "operationally heavy," she added, and it was detracting from the amount of time the team was able to spend on more complex, higher-level creative projects. Now, they're able to offload the more "manual, repetitive work" and put their energy into developing thoughtful creative, she said. Goop's partnership with Adora is one of its first "meaningful forays into AI within marketing," Ritacco said, and won't be its last. Tagged in:

Adora promotes software architect Rohil Bhansali to head of engineering. By Holt Hackney Adora has promoted Rohil Bhansali to head of engineering, elevating the company's founding engineer to lead its technical organization as the advertising technology firm expands its platform for enterprise clients. Bhansali has been with the company since its founding in 2024 and helped build its initial technology infrastructure. In his new role, he will oversee Adora's engineering team and guide development of the platform as the company seeks to support a growing number of large corporate users. The company said Bhansali will focus on strengthening engineering systems and infrastructure designed to help marketing teams automate parts of their campaign operations while retaining oversight of brand and creative decisions. Adora develops artificial intelligence tools intended to help companies launch and manage advertising campaigns more quickly and analyze campaign performance at scale. According to the company, several enterprise brands, including Brooks Running, Alaska Airlines and Servco Pacific, currently use the platform. Bhansali previously spent more than six years at Pinterest, where he worked on measurement and attribution systems designed to track advertising performance. During that time, he helped develop conversion tracking infrastructure and tools aimed at helping advertisers measure and improve campaign results while complying with privacy requirements. At Adora, Bhansali built the company's first working prototype and has been involved in key architectural decisions for the platform. Among his recent work was leading the redevelopment of the company's creative insights reporting tools, which analyze advertising performance data to identify which visual or creative elements are most closely associated with clicks, conversions and sales. In his new position, Bhansali is expected to expand the company's engineering organization and guide the development of technical infrastructure intended to support additional enterprise clients. The promotion comes as the company continues to grow its engineering and product teams and build out its technology platform for large marketing organizations.