Harnessing the Fundamentals of Marketing to Transform the Consumer Journey in the Age of AI
Camino5’s co-founders explore the strategic power of AI and reveal how integrating market research with the consumer journey enables brands to craft smarter, more effective multichannel strategies
Ryan Edwards and Frances Méndez are co-founders of Camino5, a digital strategy and consumer journey consultancy that helps companies and brands combine strategic foresight with grounded execution.
Ryan is the Head of Strategy. He brings over 25 years of experience at the intersection of innovation, marketing, and consumer experience, having led initiatives for Fortune 500 companies such as Oracle, Kaiser, NBCUniversal, Sony, and Disney. His approach is grounded in a simple philosophy: your audience isn’t a KPI; they’re people with real problems, needs, and wants.
Frances is the Managing Director. She draws on a background in enterprise operations, CPG, publishing, and the entertainment industry. She’s worked behind the scenes of iconic global brands and led digital transformation for organizations at every stage of growth. Her work centers on making innovation accessible, human, and real-world-ready.
The Continuum sat down with Ryan and Frances to talk about the ever-changing digital landscape, good (and bad) roles for AI, how they chose their company’s name, and what it’s like building a business together as partners.
How did you choose the name Camino5?
[Frances] Camino means "way, path, or road" in Spanish, and it felt like the perfect name for what we do and captures our business philosophy. It's not just about mapping the consumer journey—every brand is on a journey too. We often work with founders whose brand story is deeply personal, as well as established enterprises navigating digital transformation. Wherever they are in that process, we meet them there and create a path forward together. The bilingual element reflects my Cuban heritage and has always been an important aspect of our work.
Can you start by explaining Camino5 and what you do for clients?
[Ryan] We are a boutique consultancy focused on conducting marketing research and creating consumer journeys. Those two topics complement each other because you can't design a consumer journey without fully understanding both the consumer and the company's value propositions. The consumer journey is really in the market research.
Consumer journeys have heightened importance right now, and marketers are finally noticing that. Six years ago, people thought, “Consumer journeys, yeah, whatever. We'll just throw up some paid media and get the responses.” Four years ago, it was “Consumer journeys, yeah, whatever. We'll just hire an influencer and get all the marketing done that way.” Thankfully, we’re going back to how it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and even the early 2000s, when there was an understanding that marketing needed a balanced approach. Today, marketing requires a little bit of brand, a little bit of performance, a little bit of social, a little bit of content, and a little bit of CRM to make your marketing really work well. And so that's what we do.
Is there a specific way you divide the roles, or do both of you really do it all?
[Ryan] Frances and I divide it up based on our background. I spent the last 10 years in the agency world, and before that, in the entertainment world. Frances’s background was more in-house, although she's spent time at some agencies. She's been more focused on execution and operations. My background is in the “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” Frances, on the other hand, has always been the Chief of Getting S**t Done.
[Frances] A lot of what we do starts in strategy, and then we look at the opposite spectrum, figuring out how we put it into practice. Having both those perspectives is critical to our clients because we have a full understanding of the process.
“Today, marketing requires a little bit of brand, a little bit of performance, a little bit of social, a little bit of content, and a little bit of CRM to make it really to make your marketing really work well.”
Digital marketing has been in flux for a while. We spent years discussing the cookie's demise, and now we’re dealing with the impact of Google’s AI overview on SEO and traffic. How are these changes impacting digital strategy?
[Ryan] For me, it can all be summed up with what's new is old. Yes, there are a whole lot of new changes, but digital marketing has a history of major changes—websites to responsive to apps to performance to influencers to AI. Every three years or so, a transformation changes the digital marketing world.
I think some of the fundamentals got lost in the last five or six years because of the heightened focus on growth hacking. Marketers were convinced that if they optimized the hell out of just one channel, they could use it to drive all of their traffic. I think the latest shifts in GenAI and social has blown up that siloed game. It’s compacted the buying journey because consumers can do their research far faster.
It's frustrating, but it’s also reminded people about the fundamentals of marketing. You can’t just focus on one channel like SEO for your conversion, and you can’t just focus on paid search. You need to understand that the marketing game is about conveying value to a consumer who has a need and conveying it to them multiple times. We should have been doing this the whole time, but I think the AI overview was really the straw that broke the camel’s back and got the industry back to basics.
What about the consumer journey has changed with the introduction of AI and AI-driven search?
[Ryan] If we got back to those basics, we can think of marketing as the upper, mid, and lower funnel. Upper funnel tends to be brand. These are things that aren’t meant to drive conversion directly, but are meant to make you aware of the company and of the value it creates. This includes things like commercials, things like billboards, and some content marketing. Mid funnel is for people who have a need, are starting to do research, and have heard of your brand. A lot of content marketing is middle funnel material, but it also includes banner ads, display marketing, and influencers. Lower funnel tends to be for people who are ready to buy. This is about who makes the process easiest, who is going to give you the best price, who gives you the most value.
The AI-driven search means that brands have to start moving up the funnel. For a while, marketers felt like they could skimp on brand and just do conversion marketing—get the people who were already well into the buying process. But we are seeing a drop-off in click-through, channels like SEO and paid search are not performing individually like they used to. This means that the upper funnel (brand and awareness) is becoming much more important, and people are realizing the importance of balanced strategies again.
I’ll also add that AI overview has changed the way people are using search. The search patterns are changing from “What's the best product?” or “What’s the best pasta or my lasagna?” to “How can I make the best lasagna?” These questions are much more natural to people. Marketers are going to have to adjust to this change in search as well.
“You need to understand that the marketing game is about conveying value to a consumer who has a need and conveying it to them multiple times.”
As content experts, what do you think about generative AI? There is a lot of debate about whether and how to use it.
[Ryan] The perfect generative AI strategy is to create a piece of content that is entirely written by a person and then use that as a tentpole piece that AI can develop spheres around to build out the volume of content. Every piece of content should be an ecosystem created around particular thoughts, theories, and definitions. But at the core of that ecosystem should be something made by a person with the empathy, thoughts, and feelings of a human. People will know if it wasn’t. This takes a lot of time for it to work, but it works incredibly well.
[Frances] I think the challenge we have nowadays is getting people to understand when not to use AI. We developed a process called "Paired Perspective." It’s really about humans plus AI. When doing content creation or market research, we break down the process into small steps—whether that’s 26 steps or hundreds of steps. We look at every point in the process to decide if it can be done by AI and when we have to insert a human. And we always have a human at the end. It's critical that at the end, we're reviewing and assessing the research or the content to make sure it’s authentic and feels human.
Do you have any other advice for people who are using generative AI?
[Ryan] As Frances said, we follow so many steps. We've been using generative AI heavily for a long time, and we found that the best way to work is to use micro-steps so that you can guide the AI. For example, you don’t ask AI to write an article from scratch. First, you ask it for a content outline. Then you edit the content outline and ask it to elaborate on specific topics. Then you can keep adjusting and asking for additional text. It’s never going to be a purely human-written work, but you’ve guided it through each step, and now you have an answer that you can trust.
“This means that the upper funnel (brand and awareness) is becoming much more important, and people are realizing the importance of balanced strategies again.”
If the process is this detailed, does it save you time?
[Ryan] If your goal is to use AI to just save time, you have the wrong goal. Your goal should be to use AI to use your time more wisely and create better outcomes. The place where AI can save you the most time is in the research. If you train your AI correctly, it can save you hours or even days in research. It can also help you reset. When AI gives you a crazy answer that is obviously not human, it can help a creative person reorganize their thoughts. I will also add that I’m dyslexic, and AI has been a godsend for me.
[Frances] I use AI to reformat notes depending on who they’re for. For example, I’ll ask it to create a more visual, simplified outline for my partner, who’s dyslexic, and a more detailed version for myself with added context around business goals. It’s the same content, just adapted to how each of us processes information.
As for whether it saves time overall, I’d say it will—after you’ve spent some time working through and understanding your own process. This is true for any project or any new technology. The first time you go through a process, it will take longer. Eventually, it will expedite and simplify your work. We’re really at the beginning stages with AI. My background is in web design, and I feel like we’re back in the 1990s using basic HTML and learning something new every time. We will get used to it, and it will keep changing.
[Ryan] If I could sum up our opinion on AI, I’d say this. People who see AI as a reason to diminish headcount are going to face challenges in a year. People who are using AI to make the people they have work better and be more intelligent are going to be winning in the year.
This actually isn't the first business you have started together. Can you tell us a little bit about your backgrounds?
[Frances] I've always been in publishing and web development. I took a Photoshop class in the 1990s, and everything was moving so fast back then that we ended up teaching our teacher how to use the newest version. And the teacher suggested that some of us take a course on HTML, which was very new. That's how I got into the field, and then Ryan followed into this digital world. He started working for an agency that created the first websites for radio stations. When the agency went out of business, he literally had the websites on a hard drive and decided he could handle managing them himself. That became our first company.
We started handling a lot of entertainment websites. It was interesting. They'd bring you crazy ideas that artists wanted to do, like a scavenger hunt through the city. We were also the first to figure out how to put audio on the station's radio website.
Eventually we went in various directions—I focused more on in-house digital operations while Ryan expanded his experience across agencies. Those different paths gave us complementary perspectives that help us understand both strategic vision and the realities of implementation.
“If your goal is to use AI to just save time, you have the wrong goal. Your goal should be to use AI to use your time more wisely and create better outcomes.”
What made you decide to step away from those jobs and start a new company together?
[Ryan] COVID happened, and like many people, we started rethinking what the future of work meant for us.
[Frances] We’ve long been proponents of remote work—it’s how we work best. So we just went for it. We didn’t even tell our family or friends at first, because we figured they’d try to talk us out of launching something new during a pandemic.
What’s it like to live and work together?
[Frances] Being together all the time has its positives and negatives. One of the biggest positives is the zone of comfort and trust we work in. It’s invaluable to have your teammate always there—whether inspiration strikes or a challenge comes up. It makes the workflow easier and often faster. Our clients are sometimes surprised at how quickly we respond, but we’re able to align in real time and work through solutions efficiently. Of course, the flip side is that we’re always working, and the boundaries between work and life can blur. Even our kids will remind us to step back and take a break from work conversations—but at the end of the day, that constant alignment is what allows us to deliver at a high level for our clients.
[Ryan] The reality is, you can't come home and complain about your coworker, because your coworker is your partner. But ultimately, that’s also the strength: we’re aligned, we trust each other, and we can deliver solutions quickly and effectively for our clients.
May 1, 2025
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