Author · Co-Founder and CEO
Prof. Aleks Farseev
Co-Founder and CEO, SOMIN · 26 articles on the SOMIN blog
About Aleks
Prof. Aleks Farseev is the co-founder and CEO of SOMIN, a research professor in digital-marketing AI, a Forbes Technology Council columnist, and co-author of 30+ peer-reviewed papers at ACM venues including Multimedia, WSDM and The Web Conference.
He leads SOMIN's research on audience profiling, personality-driven content and explainable AI for advertising; the papers and talks are on the research page.
Articles by Prof. Aleks Farseev
26 articles
Hyper-personalisation and privacy: personalise without being creepy
Hyper-personalisation and privacy can coexist: use minimal data, explain why people see a message, let them steer it and keep sensitive traits out of targeting.
MCP for marketing agencies: what changes in 2026 when AI reads live data
MCP for marketing agencies lets Claude and other assistants read live category data. What the protocol is, what changes in 2026 and what agencies should build.
Will AI replace agencies? An honest answer for agency leaders
Will AI replace agencies? Not as a category, but it will replace tasks, some roles and hourly fees. What the evidence says and how agency leaders can respond.
When a Buyer Says Your Price Is Too High, Check Your Story First
A price objection is often a positioning problem in disguise. Why unclear brands lose deals in Southeast Asia, and how entity clarity fixes it.
The Marketing Mix Modelling Barrier Did Not Disappear. It Relocated
Open-source tools make building a marketing mix model easy; knowing when it is wrong still takes expertise. Why Southeast Asia carries the most risk.
Beyond the Click: Thriving in the Era of Agentic Commerce
Marketing was a battle for the human eye. In agentic commerce, AI agents shop on people's behalf. What changes for brands, and how to stay chosen.
The Agency AI Trap: Why Proprietary Platforms Are Billion Dollar Paperweights
Every agency pitch shows a branded AI platform, yet Gartner warns half of these tools will be obsolete by 2029. What clients should ask for instead.
The Rise of Autonomous Agents in Performance Marketing: Analyzing Meta’s US$2B Manus AI Investment
How Meta's US$2 billion Manus AI deal reshapes performance marketing with autonomous agents, and why brands need vendor-neutral oversight of AI buying.
The Strategic Translator: How AI is Redefining the Marketing Scientist
Marketing science is shifting from building dashboards to translating data into decisions. How AI is redefining the marketing scientist's role.
The Autonomous Agent Era: Meta’s Manus Acquisition and the Death of Dashboard SaaS
How Meta's US$2 billion Manus acquisition and the Model Context Protocol are replacing dashboard SaaS with autonomous AI agents fed by real data.
Breaking the Walls: Meta’s Strategic Shift Toward Open AI Connectors
Meta is opening its ad platform to AI connectors and agents. What the architectural shift means for advertisers, agencies and their marketing stacks.
The Shadow Ledger: Why AI Governance Defines Modern Brand Trust and Enterprise Revenue
Why AI governance decides brand trust and revenue, and how to remove the shadow ledger with a clear decision architecture for autonomous agents.
Beyond the Grid: How AI is Rewriting the Global Playbook for Land Rover
A message that sells in Manhattan can fall flat in Tokyo. How generative AI decodes regional drivers to localise the global playbook for Land Rover Defender.
The Death of the Delivery Hour: Why Strategic Brilliance is Marketing’s New Currency
How Salesforce's agentic AI removes billable execution hours from marketing and moves the premium to strategic judgement. What agencies must change.
The Day the Mind Went Dark: Washington Just Exposed Asia’s Massive AI Blind Spot
A US directive pulled a leading AI model offline for foreign users days after launch. What it exposed about Asia's platform risk, and how to hedge it.
The Agentic Era of Marketing: From Static Automation to Real-Time Reasoning
Marketing automation follows fixed rules; agentic AI reasons in real time. What the shift means for teams, workflows and the marketing stack.
Meta Replaced Your Media Buyer With AI: How To Survive The Automation Takeover
AI ad platforms are moving performance away from manual targeting and toward creative strategy. How marketers and media buyers can adapt and win.
The Evolution of the Agency Pitch: Why Strategic Intelligence Must Replace Content Execution
Agencies still sell engagement and content volume while CMOs buy revenue and pipeline velocity. Why the pitch must lead with strategic intelligence.
The Architecture of Failure: Why Your Go-To-Market Strategy Is Broken and How to Fix It
Most go-to-market failures are structural architecture problems, not strategy flaws. How elevating marketing operations drives scalable revenue.
How to Choose an AI Marketing Agency That Actually Delivers Growth
Five criteria for judging an AI marketing agency, from platform ownership to human oversight, plus the key questions to ask before you sign.
Agency business model in the AI era: from retainers to agents
How AI changes the agency business model: why FTE retainers break when agents do production, which pricing models replace them and what clients still pay for.
SOMIN Named Among Echelon 2025’s Top 10 Startups
SOMIN, the AI creative planning and competitive intelligence platform for marketing teams, is named one of Echelon 2025's Top 10 Startups in Singapore.
Inside Marketing Mondays: How AI Is Changing the Way We Do Competitor and Audience Research
Inside Marketing Mondays: how AI turns competitor and audience research from guesswork into a game plan, starting with a deep read of the audience.
A Beginner’s Guide to the AIDA Marketing Model: How to Attract and Convert Customers
How the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) attracts and converts customers, with real examples and practical tips for beginner marketers.
Expanding Horizons: Leveraging Large Language Models for Business Innovation Beyond Chatbots
How large language models are moving past chatbots into real business products, through the startups backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Social Listening Tools: The Essential Guide for Marketers in 2024
The top social listening tools compared, from Brand24 and Sprout Social to Hootsuite, plus how SOMONITOR combines ad monitoring with social listening.