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Lisa Jilek
Company
Brandpoint
Location
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Bio
My career has ranged from founding a consulting business to leading large, diverse teams in enterprise corporate environments to driving revenue growth and innovation as CEO at Vervint and now Brandpoint. No matter the size of the organization, I believe in bringing an entrepreneurial spirit, a growth mindset, and creating talkable experiences for clients and employees. Throughout my career, I’ve led organizations through transformational change, always with a focus on scaling growth while aligning people with purpose, recognized as Best Purpose-Drive CEO in 2023. My approach is centered around setting a compelling vision, creating clarity on business objectives, and leading transformational initiatives with motivated teams rallying together.
My career has ranged from founding...
description
We deliver premium paid placements, earned editorial coverage, and measurable AI visibility. We’re a MarCom intelligence partner that monitors AI visibility, provides real-time insights, and connects brands to a proprietary network of publishers and editors for paid and earned media.
We deliver premium paid placements, earned...
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Actionable Takeaways
60% of AI-Assisted Searches End in Zero Clicks — and Marketers Aren't Ready:
When someone uses an AI overview (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity), they increasingly get the answer without clicking through to any source. For marketers and retailers, that means traditional traffic models are breaking down. Being cited in the AI answer is now more valuable than ranking first in search results.
AI Visibility Is a CEO-Level Concern, Not a Marketing Tactic:
As 68% of buyers use AI across their entire purchase journey — consideration, comparison, and final decision — where you show up (or don't) in those AI responses is a business-level revenue problem. Every CMO and CEO needs a real-time view of their brand's AI visibility and a strategy for improving it.
Earned and Paid Are Not Silos — They Compound Each Other:
Marketing departments have historically run paid and earned in separate lanes. In the AI visibility era, they are inseparable: paid builds the authority and scale that makes earned possible; earned generates the citations that AI uses as validation. Running one without the other is leaving leverage on the table.
AI Looks for Corroboration, Not Authority:
AI doesn't surface brands based on a single press release or a high domain authority score. It looks for sources of truth that validate each other — Reddit threads, Quora answers, G2 reviews, user-generated content that corroborates a claim. Brands that show up authentically across multiple sources get cited. Brands that rely on one channel don't.
LLMs Change Every 17 Days — Visibility Is Not a One-and-Done:
Something that was cited at the top of an AI response two weeks ago may not appear today. The models update, the data shifts, the ranking changes. AI visibility is an ongoing monitoring practice, not a campaign. Brands that treat it as a one-time optimization will lose ground to those that treat it as a continuous process.
30 Years of Content Expertise Pointed at a New Question:
Brandpoint didn't pivot away from its core; it pointed its existing intelligence at a more relevant question. The infrastructure for understanding where content gets visibility, how it gets read, and what drives engagement was already built. The question simply changed from 'are people reading this?' to 'am I showing up in AI for the category I want?'
Human + Findable by AI: The New Brand Content Mandate:
AI favors what humans value. Content that is original, insightful, valuable, and sounds human is what AI surfaces. The implication: no matter how much AI tooling you're using to produce content, the output must still represent the brand in a genuinely human voice. AI will find it — but only if humans value it first.
Simulate Before You Publish:
BrandPoint360 allows brands to simulate content before publishing to predict how it will perform in AI visibility — a replacement for traditional A/B testing. Rather than publishing, waiting, and iterating, brands can model the AI visibility impact of content choices before committing resources.
Conversation Highlights
Lisa Jilek, CEO of Brandpoint, is operating at the exact intersection where 30 years of content distribution expertise meets the most significant shift in how consumers discover brands in a decade. Brandpoint — built on content placement and earned media since its founding — has pivoted its entire intelligence engine toward a single urgent question: how do brands show up in AI? In this episode, Lisa breaks down the zero-click era (60% of AI-assisted searches end with no click), why LLMs change every 17 days making AI visibility an ongoing process not a one-time fix, why earned and paid media must be run together rather than in silos, why AI looks for corroboration rather than authority (Reddit, Quora, G2), and why the BrandPoint360 intelligence platform launching in 2026 represents a fundamentally new way for brands to monitor, understand, and act on their AI visibility in real time. This is the conversation every CMO should be having — and most aren’t yet.
Topics Discussed
- Lisa’s background: marketing, management, storytelling, communications, business transformation; based in Minneapolis; CEO of Brandpoint for ~1 year
- What Brandpoint does: marcom intelligence partner that monitors AI visibility, provides real-time insights, and connects brands to a proprietary network of publishers for paid and earned media
- The zero-click era: 60% of all AI-assisted searches end in no click — a direct threat to traffic, conversions, and marketing ROI
- 68% of humans are using AI in the buying process (McKinsey) — consideration, comparison, and purchase decisions all flowing through AI
- AI visibility as a CEO-level concern, not just a marketing department tactic
- Why paid and earned media must work together: paid builds authority and scale; earned drives the citations that AI uses — they compound each other
- AI looks for corroboration: Reddit, Quora, G2, user reviews — AI validates through consensus, not single-source authority
- LLMs change every 17 days — AI visibility is not a one-and-done strategy but an ongoing monitor-and-pivot process
- Brandpoint’s 30-year history: founded on content placements and distribution, now pointing that expertise at the question of AI visibility
- Repositioning for the AI era: from ‘are people reading my content?’ to ‘am I showing up in AI in the category I want?’
- BrandPoint360 intelligence platform: real-time insights, AI visibility scores, content simulation before publishing, competitor benchmarking
- Client profile: any brand (enterprise to emerging) wanting to understand and improve their AI visibility baseline
- Works with PR agencies and marketing agencies as their AI visibility tool and intelligence layer for their own clients
- Team: US-based, hybrid; HQ in Hopkins, Minnesota
- 2026 goal: full go-to-market launch of BrandPoint360
