Gary Kamikawa, Head of Marketing and Growth Tech at Amazon Music, believes the magic happens where art meets science. In this Q&A, he shares how he’s transforming static campaigns into dynamic experiences, why curiosity is his ultimate efficiency hack, and how connecting creativity with technology keeps every listener at the center of the story.
Favorite project you’ve worked on recently?
Developing an in-app game called Ritmo, in partnership withJ Balvin. The theme follows J Balvin’s creative journey through music, with each level representing a place of personal meaning to him. It’s been incredibly rewarding to collaborate with artists and creators in ways that surprise and delight fans transforming the music experience into something interactive and deeply personal.
How do you describe Movable Ink and its value to your business to another marketer?
Movable Ink unlocks real-time, data-driven personalization across our marketing ecosystem. It allows us to activate data dynamically, tailoring content and recommendations based on context and behavior. The ability to apply these experiences consistently across channels provides both continuity and efficiency or as I like to say,“one tag to rule them all.” It’s a powerful enabler that elevates our creative quality while lowering operational complexity.
What’s one thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?
I have an insatiable curiosity for learning new things across a wide range of topics. AI is a great example. While I’ve led the development of a number of AI tools and experiences, I’m just as fascinated by how people use AI every day to solve small problems or enhance creativity in their daily lives. From their son getting therapy and help from Grok while riding home from school every day in the Tesla to someone realizing they have 40 tabs open from the past couple of days and having AI group and summarize the different likely work efforts for the collection of tabs and providing recommendations on how to further address what they may have been researching or problem they were trying to solve.
How has Movable Ink helped you in your career?
Movable Ink has helped bridge the gap between creative ambition and technical execution. It’s given me and my team the ability to scale storytelling with precision, transforming static campaigns into dynamic experiences that evolve with each listener’s context. It’s also been instrumental in mentoring others to think more fluidly about marketing moments seeing personalization as a conversation, not just a campaign.
What campaign are you most excited to work on this year?
Our AI-assisted campaign orchestration initiative which blends generative content creation, Movable Ink personalization, and predictive segmentation. The goal is to create experiences that feel tailor-made for every listener while achieving automation-level efficiency. It’s the next step in merging human creativity with machine intelligence.
What is your greatest marketing superpower?
My ability to connect creativity with technology. I love translating complex systems, from data pipelines to ML models, into experiences that feel intuitive and emotionally resonant. It’s where art and science meet, and where marketing becomes magic.
What are the main goals your team aims to achieve with your email program?
We’re focused on three core outcomes:
1. Depth of personalization: ensuring every email or touchpoint reflects an individual’s listening journey.
2. Operational efficiency: leveraging AI in automating and templatizing repetitive tasks.
3. Cross-channel continuity: ensuring email complements push, in-app, and other experiences as one cohesive voice.
What's your greatest efficiency hack for working smarter not harder?
Automate what you can but never automate curiosity and creativity. We rely on automation and AI to handle data and delivery, freeing time for strategy, testing, and iteration. The real efficiency comes from focusing human effort where it has the most creative and analytical value. Find ways to use AI in your every day working life. I use it daily from writing documents, doing research or analysis, or providing transcript and summaries with action items from my meetings. The more you use AI, you become more proficient but it is amazing how well AI will learn and understand you and can “speak” more in your own voice and style.
