Former Airbnb product marketing lead John Gargiulo believes the problem with paid social advertising today isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s the speed at which those ideas can be executed, tested, and iterated without breaking internal teams or brand safeguards. John is betting that the next competitive advantage in the creator economy will come from creative velocity, powered by artificial intelligence, but managed by people who understand performance marketing at scale.

That belief underpins Airpost. Officially launched in January 2026 after being incubated inside John’s video-first creative agency Ready Set, the company positions itself as neither a traditional agency nor a self-serve AI tool. Instead, it combines proprietary AI software with hands-on creative strategy to help brands produce and test high volumes of UGC-style video ads across paid social channels.

“We leverage AI and people to build video ads for large companies at scale,” John says. “Performance video ads.”

That perspective is shaped by both his background and his view of where the market is heading. Before founding Airpost, John co-founded Ready Set in 2019, which grew into a 200-person operation serving brands like Hims & Hers, Coinbase, and DoorDash. Earlier in his career, at Airbnb, he led global product marketing, helping launch and scale new products.

That mix of agency execution, product thinking, and platform-level scale now informs John’s view of AI’s role in the creator economy and why he believes many current solutions fall short.

From Agency Bottlenecks to a Platform Opportunity

Airpost’s origin is tightly linked to Ready Set’s growth. As Ready Set scaled, John and his team saw firsthand how demand for vertical video ads was outpacing the industry’s ability to produce them efficiently.

“We realized inside Ready Set that there’s an opportunity for AI to help with this, to help make more volume, to help get more speed,” John says. “Creative at scale works, but it’s manual.”

John believes that traditional production workflows (ideation, creator sourcing, product shipping, reshoots, editing, approvals) often extend a single idea into a four to six-week process before it reaches a media account. For performance teams under pressure to test quickly, that lag can be decisive.

Airpost was developed to address that constraint. The team began hiring engineers, building proprietary systems, and testing how AI could compress the most time-intensive parts of the process. By early 2025, John says it became clear the product had the potential to stand on its own.

“What needed to be true was that we wanted to really go for it with Airpost and get on the VC roller coaster,” he says. “We believed this could be a massive company in itself. It’s a technology company, whereas Ready Set is an ad agency, so they are two different journeys.”

Airpost raised outside capital in March 2025 and officially spun out later that year. Within a week of its public launch on January 20, 2026, John reports that the company generated more than 10 million impressions around its announcement and fielded outreach from over 200 companies.

Solving the ‘Last Five Miles’ of AI Advertising

While AI tools have proliferated across marketing workflows, John argues that most fail where it matters most for large brands.

“What these AI tools don’t solve well is the last five miles of AI,” he says. “You get something that’s okay, but it’s not there yet. If I’m not comfortable posting this ad, it may as well be zero.”

That “last five miles” includes brand safety, legal compliance, creative quality, and performance viability, i.e., areas where even small errors can disqualify an ad entirely. John points to issues such as inaccurate claims, off-brand messaging, and visual glitches as non-starters for enterprise teams.

“Even if the ad is just a little off, it may as well never be created,” he says.

Airpost’s approach is designed to fill that gap by pairing automation with human oversight. The platform generates AI-driven ads across ideation, production, and post-production, but every output is reviewed and refined by an internal creative strategy team before reaching the client.

“We have world-class creative strategists in the loop,” John says. “That’s not something you get with most AI companies.”

Creative Diversity as a Performance Constraint

When brands first engage with Airpost, John says the most common challenge he hears isn’t media efficiency or budget pressure, but creative sameness.

“I keep hearing the same word: creative diversity,” he says. “They’re rerunning the same themes, the same offers. They know it, and they want to break out of that rut, but it’s hard.”

To address this, Airpost has built a creative taxonomy that maps personas, angles, formats, and visual styles across each brand’s product portfolio. The system is designed to identify both what has worked historically and, more importantly, what hasn’t yet been tested.

“You’ve never tried an ad with men over 50 with this angle in this visual format,” John says. “That’s where you’re going to find gold; where you haven’t looked yet.”

Each brand operates on a custom AI model that reflects its specific product, audience, and historical performance data. The goal, John notes, is not to flood media accounts with random variations, but to surface structured experimentation opportunities that teams can learn from quickly.

How Airpost Works in Practice

From a client perspective, Airpost is designed to be intentionally low-lift. John says many AI tools end up consuming more time than they save.

“A lot of people tell us, ‘I need something that’s not too burdensome on my team,’” he says.

Brands begin with what Airpost calls a “living brief” – a dynamic document where value propositions, personas, and messaging priorities can be adjusted over time. Clients connect their existing asset libraries via Google Drive or Dropbox, enabling the platform to automatically ingest, tag, and categorize footage.

From there, Airpost’s system generates ads within days. John notes that smaller clients might receive around 10 ads per week, while larger brands can see 40 to 50 weekly outputs. Teams can then iterate directly within the platform, swapping clips or adjusting on-screen text through a simplified editor designed for speed.

“We spent a lot of time on that editor,” John says. “The two things people change most are the words on screen and the clips. We made those lightning fast.”

Volume, Speed, and the Reality of Enterprise Constraints

While Airpost emphasizes creative volume as a performance lever, John is realistic about the organizational friction that comes with scale, especially inside regulated or risk-averse companies.

“Most big companies are not ready to look at 80 ads a week,” he says. “Legal teams, compliance teams … It’s a lot.”

As a result, Airpost is already exploring agent-based QA systems designed to review large volumes of creative for brand and legal compliance before human approval. John sees this as a necessary progression as AI increases output capacity across the industry.

“We’re going to need trusted agents that can look at 800 things someday,” he says.

Product Thinking Shaped at Airbnb

John traces much of his philosophy back to his time at Airbnb, where product marketing decisions were deeply tied to user empathy and structured experimentation.

“Planning what your experiment is, what you’re trying to learn. That’s critical,” he says. “If you don’t know what you’re expecting, it gets foggy at the end.”

More broadly, Airbnb reinforced the importance of customer-centric thinking beyond surface-level metrics.

“It’s really sliding into the shoes of your customer and caring,” John says. “Not just about what button they click, but how they’re actually feeling.”

That mindset now shapes how Airpost approaches both its clients and their end audiences, particularly in a market where AI adoption has often outpaced understanding.

Brand Hesitation Around AI

Despite growing interest, John acknowledges that many brands remain cautious about AI-driven advertising. According to him, that skepticism is justified.

“A lot of AI companies got out over their skis,” he says. “Three months come and go, and the world isn’t totally different.”

For CMOs burned by early AI trials, Airpost’s positioning emphasizes reassurance as much as efficiency.

“Showing that there are real people in the machine helps,” John says. “Senior creative strategists in Slack with you – that’s comforting.”

He describes Airpost as “AI-powered, but human-managed,” a framing he believes resonates with teams that want innovation without relinquishing control.

Advice and Goals

When it comes to his advice to CMO planning for 2026, John says that “AI is about to open up a whole new level of creative volume, quality, and potential,” adding that “there are strategic ways to lower the cost of acquisition more than ever before.”

For Airpost, the long-term goal is not to replace creative teams, but to change how efficiently advertising dollars are deployed.

“When I zoom out, I hope Airpost helps brands make their advertising spend 10x more efficient,” John says. “It’s not about replacing people. It’s about making creative more performant by increasing the volume and speed by 10x. That will be an exciting new level for the industry.”