Research Group · Universitat de Barcelona
We research the shift from traditional workflow-driven marketing to autonomous AI ecosystems: how agentic systems plan, decide and execute campaigns at machine speed — and how aesthetic resonance determines who wins the attention that remains.
For decades, marketing operated as an assembly line: segment, create, publish, measure. A sequential process designed for a world where human attention was abundant and content production was expensive.
Both premises have now reversed. Human attention has become the planet's scarcest resource — with an average window of 8.25 seconds before the brain discards a stimulus — while quality content production approaches zero marginal cost through generative AI.
The new paradigm is not simply "faster automation." It is an architectural reconfiguration: AI systems now act as autonomous agents capable of perceiving context, planning action sequences and executing campaigns without step-by-step human intervention. The marketing professional's role shifts from tool operator to strategic orchestrator: the one who defines objectives, ethical constraints and success criteria.
Agents run complete A/B testing cycles, creative optimisation and budget reallocation in real time — in milliseconds no human team can match.
Brand strategy, ethical values and decisions with reputational consequences remain under human control. Oversight is not optional: it is the model.
In an ecosystem saturated with algorithmically optimised messages, competitive advantage will migrate from efficiency toward aesthetic authenticity and emotional coherence.
«How do consumers respond when purchases are made on their behalf by an autonomous AI agent?»
Agentic Marketing systems are goal-oriented AI architectures that plan, decide and execute autonomously — without following predefined workflows. Unlike traditional automation, which runs a fixed script, a marketing agent perceives environmental signals, reasons over them and generates its own action sequences.
«When does aesthetic resonance outperform functional value propositions as a conversion driver?»
Vibe Marketing describes an execution modality in which emotional resonance, tone and aesthetic coherence outperform feature-based selling arguments. In an environment where consumers face thousands of algorithmically optimised messages, distinction does not emerge from a better argument — it emerges from an experience that feels different.
AI agents allow brands to scale this capability without sacrificing authenticity: compressing production cycles from weeks to hours, maintaining voice consistency across hundreds of variations and detecting aesthetic friction in real time before it translates into conversion losses.
The lab's proprietary methodology for AI-driven Vibe Marketing implementation
Identify aesthetic and emotional friction points across brand touchpoints. Where does the experience lose coherence?
Generate creative assets through generative AI pipelines, with brand identity enforced as a non-negotiable constraint.
Design and run aesthetic variation experiments at scale. Identify which vibrational elements drive the highest resonance.
Monitor outcomes beyond CTR: brand perception consistency, emotional resonance scores and NPS impact.
Four research lines that will define the marketing discipline over the next decade. Each represents an open question our lab is committed to answering with empirical rigor.
«How will brand agents negotiate with consumers' personal AI assistants — and what does brand loyalty mean in a world without intentional search?»
By 2027–2030, personal AI assistants will act as autonomous purchasing proxies. We investigate A2A negotiation protocols, the implications for brand loyalty when the human consumer is absent from the purchase decision, and the new influence vectors that emerge in this ecosystem.
«How do multiple specialised agents — researcher, creator, distributor — coordinate to produce coherent campaigns without per-task human supervision?»
We study the orchestration architecture of systems where specialised agents collaborate in a unified environment. Coordination friction and goal alignment mechanisms are the central objects of our investigation.
«Can a conversational agent faithfully embody a brand and build hyper-personalised experiences without losing authenticity or incurring reputational risk?»
Brand Twins are AI agents that internalise a brand's values, tone and identity to represent it in conversational interactions at scale. We investigate the limits of artificial authenticity, "personality drift" risks and the governance frameworks required for responsible deployment.
«What structure and semantic signals does content need to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini — when 68% of all searches end with zero clicks?»
Traditional SEO optimises for ranking positions. GEO optimises for selection as a source by language models that respond directly. We investigate authority signals, structure and informational density patterns that increase citation probability in generative responses.
We propose a theoretical framework to classify agentic marketing systems by autonomy level, planning capacity and human intervention threshold. Validated with data from 12 Fortune 500 companies.
Analysis of 47 real-world cases across FMCG, B2B tech and entertainment. Firms implementing generative AI pipelines reduce production costs by 70–80% within six-month cycles.
Comparative study of 200 web pages across Google Search vs. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. We identify 7 content signals that significantly predict citation in generative responses (p < 0.01).
We introduce the Vibe Marketing concept and empirically validate that aesthetic coherence predicts purchase intent more reliably than functional product attributes in high algorithmic competition categories.
An interdisciplinary team combining academic rigour with hands-on expertise in digital marketing, AI architectures and business strategy.
We are looking for researchers with backgrounds in marketing, AI, behavioural science or systems engineering interested in the empirical study of agentic marketing ecosystems.
Apply as a researcher