By: William Jones
Big brands often use AI to churn out content or optimize ad spend. Still, mission-driven organizations are discovering a different use: connecting with real people whose experiences deeply align with their cause.
Glassybaby, a Seattle-based company known for its hand-blown glass votives and drinking glasses, recently reached a milestone: over $16 million donated to cancer causes since its founding. The company was started by three-time cancer survivor Lee Rhodes, who built a business that combines artistry with philanthropy. To celebrate, Glassybaby launched the “Light It Forward” campaign, aiming to gift 1,600 glassybabies to people affected by cancer and encourage each recipient to pass the light to someone else in their life.
Finding the right people for such a profoundly personal campaign was a challenge. Traditional influencer agencies quoted more than $50,000 and still could not effectively surface voices with authentic connections to cancer. Doing it manually would have taken weeks of scrolling through social profiles, reading bios, and hoping to find meaningful stories without any systematic approach.
Glassybaby turned to MarkeTeam.ai, an AI marketing platform that leverages specialized autonomous agents to manage marketing tasks from strategy to execution. The platform can handle everything from SEO and social media to outreach, effectively acting as an on-demand marketing workforce. For this campaign, MarkeTeam.ai helped identify content creators with real cancer experiences, which traditional agencies could not provide.
The platform also enabled personalized outreach. MarkeTeam.ai helped craft messages tailored to each creator, reflecting their individual cancer journey. This personalization helped foster genuine engagement and made sure that the stories featured in the campaign were authentic and deeply human.
The impact was immediate. Dani Wicks nominated her friend Nichole, who had passed away before her glassybaby arrived, and the company delivered it to Nichole’s fifteen-year-old daughter. In Hawaii, a grandmother nominated Leila, who had lost her mother to cancer, then lost everything in the Lahaina fire, and recently gave birth to a daughter named after her late mother. Christine, who cared for her husband through thirteen years of cancer treatment, said she never believed she deserved recognition for her caregiving until she received her glassybaby and shared her story.
By focusing on significance rather than audience size, Glassybaby’s campaign illustrated a shift in mission-driven marketing. Instead of chasing reach or engagement metrics, the team used technology to find people whose experiences closely aligned with their mission. MarkeTeam.ai allowed Glassybaby to manage the campaign efficiently, surface authentic voices, and amplify stories that resonated deeply with the communities they serve.
For smaller nonprofits or organizations operating with tight budgets, this approach could offer a clear advantage. MarkeTeam.ai brings advanced creator discovery, once available only to major brands, to mission-driven teams. Its AI agents can search for nuanced criteria, helping organizations find people who have navigated specific challenges or lived experiences that are closely related to their cause.
Founded in 2025 and backed by three million dollars in seed funding, MarkeTeam.ai is expanding rapidly in the U.S., developing new AI models that continue to refine how brands and nonprofits connect with authentic voices. The platform demonstrates that AI can extend human judgment rather than replace it, highlighting potential collaborators while leaving the final decisions to the people running the campaign.
Glassybaby itself remains a compelling example of how mission and business can intersect. Its hand-blown votives and drinking glasses are designed to spread light, and 10% of all sales support cancer organizations and other charitable causes. By pairing a mission-driven company with a platform like MarkeTeam.ai, the campaign combined creativity, empathy, and technology to tell stories that truly mattered.
In a world where audiences increasingly demand authenticity and meaningful storytelling, platforms that can connect missions with the right voices are becoming essential. For Glassybaby, MarkeTeam.ai was more than a tool; it was a partner in discovering the real stories behind the cause and helping ensure that those stories reached the people who needed to hear them most.
