Marketing Vanguard

If you’re wondering why your good ol’ marketing playbook no longer works, the answer probably lies in the funnel you’re targeting.

Turns out, the buyer changed the route.

Recorded live at Advertising Week New York, this episode of Marketing Vanguard features Jenny Rooney in conversation with Salesforce CMO Erin Oles to unpack what happens when customer behavior moves faster than the funnel marketers built around it. Erin gets into why traditional attribution assumptions are starting to crack, why marketers need to understand how their brand appears inside LLMs and why AI should be given real problems instead of vague “use cases.”

Erin Oles is Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce.

Her path into marketing began in sales, an experience she credits with teaching her how quickly you can tell whether a message actually resonates with a real person.

Today, her approach to AI is similarly practical. Rather than treating new technology as something marketers need to master in theory, Erin argues for learning by doing, staying anchored to customer problems and handing repetitive work to AI when human judgment can be better spent elsewhere.
At Salesforce, that means rethinking everything from AI search visibility and customer discovery to conversational agents and real-time campaign optimization.

What You'll Learn:

Why Erin thinks the idea of a fixed marketing “playbook” is becoming an oxymoron
Why buyer behavior is making the traditional nurture funnel feel increasingly artificial
Why yesterday’s attribution models may not explain tomorrow’s customer journey
Why AEO is not simply SEO with a new acronym
How owned content can quietly work against your brand inside LLM results
Why AI works best when you start with a problem instead of a tool
Why context becomes more valuable as access to intelligence becomes more universal
How AI-driven discovery could push marketers beyond the traditional boundaries of marketing
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AI gives every marketer access to similar tools. So, how’s that going to help your brand stand out?

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with MasterCard’s Executive Vice President of Global Brand Strategy and Innovation, Cheryl Guerin, to talk about how brands can differentiate themselves when technology becomes table stakes. Cheryl gets into how MasterCard uses AI to eliminate routine brand work and free its people for higher-order thinking, why Priceless has survived nearly three decades of cultural change, and why real agility sometimes looks like saying no.

Cheryl Guerin is Executive Vice President, Global Brand Strategy and Innovation at MasterCard.

She has spent nearly 26 years at the company across a wide range of roles, including regional marketing leadership, products and services, P&L responsibility and global credit before returning to the area she describes as her heart: marketing.

Over that time, Cheryl has helped evolve the Priceless platform through major shifts in culture, technology and the business itself, leading initiatives such as the True Name card and Touch Card. Her perspective is grounded in a simple challenge: keep the brand relevant as the world changes without losing the human truth that made it matter in the first place.

What You'll Learn:

How MasterCard uses automation to free brand experts for higher-order creative work
Why Priceless has remained relevant across nearly three decades of cultural change
Why saying no is becoming a critical part of brand agility
How “passions experts” help MasterCard identify cultural opportunities earlier
Why emerging talent can create different economics and stronger relationships than obvious superstar bets
Why purpose-driven work has to connect brand ethos, constituent needs and business impact

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marketers love acquisition. But Doug Zarkin thinks that obsession is helping brands ignore the much more expensive problem sitting underneath it: retention (or the lack of it).

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with the CMO and author of “Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone” to unpack why being liked is not the same as being loved, why retention deserves the same energy as acquisition and why some of the problems blamed on marketing actually belong to the entire business. Plus, a breakdown of his “Think Human” philosophy and the leadership lesson he has landed on after decades in the business: being effective matters a lot more than being the smartest person in the room.

Doug Zarkin is CMO and author of “Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone”.
His career has taken him from the agency world into brand leadership across Avon, Victoria’s Secret and Pearle Vision, where he spent more than 11 years leading marketing. This decade-long role gave him the opportunity to take a big-picture view of brand transformation, customer loyalty and how positioning moves beyond advertising into operations and experience.

Across his work, Doug has developed a simple philosophy: brands win when they stop treating customers as transactions and start building the trust, relevance and experience that gives people a reason to choose them again.

What You'll Learn:

Why brands often overestimate how strong their customer relationships really are
Why retention deserves the same energy, budget, and attention as acquisition
Why customer churn can signal an operations problem rather than a marketing problem
How the “Think Human” philosophy changes the way brands approach customer experience
Why AI works best as a mirror and an assistant rather than a substitute for judgment
Why marketers should enter new environments with a notebook instead of a playbook

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The fastest way to shrink marketing’s influence is to treat it like it’s just another department.

In this episode of Marketing Vanguard, Jenny Rooney sits down with Kellyn Smith Kenny, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at AT&T, for a sharp conversation about what the CMO job actually demands.

Kellyn argues that marketing should operate as an engine for growth, gets into why leaders are responsible for raising the bar, why conviction without patience can backfire and a foundational mistake marketers risk making with AI.

Kellyn Smith Kenny is Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at AT&T. Here, she brings marketing and growth together - a combination reflected in how she thinks about the CMO role itself.

Her career has taken her across major brands and very different stages of company growth, including Capital One, Uber, Hilton and AT&T, giving her a broad view of what marketing leadership looks like inside both established organizations and businesses undergoing major change.

Her approach is simple: marketing cannot operate as an isolated function. It has to understand the economics of the company, build strong relationships across the organization and create the conditions for both the business and its people to perform at a higher level.

What You'll Learn:

Why marketing leaders need to understand how the entire business makes money
Why finance and operations should be allies, not neighboring departments
What separates being a marketing manager from being a company leader
Why great leaders create the conditions for people to do the best work of their careers
Why raising the bar requires conviction and patience at the same time
Why high-quality data has to come before meaningful AI adoption
Why human insight still belongs at the center of strategy and creative work
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every industry, marketing included, is battling one affliction: sameness.

Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026, Jenny Rooney sits down with Jason Pirock, Former Vice President of Global Brand Marketing at Outrigger Resorts and Hotels, to discuss why differentiation may be one of marketing's most underhyped priorities right now. Jason also challenges the industry’s fixation on ROAS, reveals why CXO titles don’t matter as much as you’d think, and what creator partnerships should really look like.

Jason Pirock is the Former Vice President of Global Brand Marketing at Outrigger Resorts and Hotels, with nearly 20 years of experience across retail, commercial real estate, and hospitality. His career has spanned work across Hyatt, Aparium Hotel Group, Springboard, and Outrigger.

Across those roles, Jason has consistently gravitated toward building and rebuilding, from rethinking an early business at Target to putting content creators into local markets before “creator” became standard marketing language. His perspective combines brand strategy, experiential marketing and a strong belief that differentiation matters even more as technology makes execution easier.

What You'll Learn:

Why hospitality’s adoption of AI is accelerating after years of lagging behind other industries
Why consumers are gravitating back toward real-world experiences and human interaction
Why authentic creator fit matters more than reach or follower count
Why senior marketing titles matter less than alignment with leadership
Why ROAS should be treated as a directional indicator rather than the full definition of success
How a builder mindset can shape a marketing leader’s career
Why differentiation becomes even more important as AI makes generic execution easier

This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.