The CMO Podcast

To kick off Women’s History Month, Jim welcomes Lara Balazs, the Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Global Marketing at Adobe. A company at the center of creativity, transformation and technology. Founded in 1982, Adobe is a software company that is famous for its creativity, innovation, and strong employee and customer-centric culture. Their purpose is to change the world through personalized digital experiences, and their offerings include the Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Adobe Express.
Lara is an experienced CMO. Before Adobe, Lara was the CMO at Intuit for six years, and oversaw a strong run, tripling revenue during her tenure. Over the course of her career, Lara has worked at Visa, Nike, Amazon, and Gap. At Adobe, Lara is leading the charge to help shape the iconic company into its next era of growth. Just one year into the role, she’s already refreshed the company’s mission to “empower everyone to create” and is leading one of the most ambitious AI-enabled marketing transformations in the industry.
Tune in for a conversation with a leader who believes we are entering the golden age of creativity…
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What does it take to revitalize a 150-year-old company? Jim’s guest this week, Conny Kalcher, has done it twice. First at LEGO during its historic turnaround, and now at Zurich Insurance as their Group Chief Customer Officer, where she’s proving that empathy is not a soft skill but a strategic advantage.
Conny spent 33 years at LEGO, where she helped navigate one of the most dramatic brand turnarounds in modern business history. Then in 2019, she joined Zurich Insurance, a company with over 200-country reach and a $100 billion market capitalization, to lead global customer loyalty and advocacy at a time when trust and humanity matter more than ever. And since joining, Conny has helped drive millions of new customers, a 35% increase in brand value, and measurable improvements in satisfaction and retention.
This is a conversation about renewing legacy brands, leading cultural transformation, and proving that empathy is not just good for people, it’s good for business.
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This week's episode is brought to you by Deloitte and IAB.
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With the Olympics bringing the world together once again through sport, we’re sharing an episode worth revisiting that feels especially timely.
This week, join us as we reach into the vault to share an episode captured live at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas in March 2025. Jim was joined on stage by Emily Silver, SVP, Chief Marketing, eCommerce & Athlete Experience Officer at Dick’s Sporting Goods, the $13 billion revenue retailer.
Dick’s was founded by Dick Stack in 1948 with his first product line, bait and tackle. Today, Pittsburgh based Dick’s Sporting Goods has more than 850 stores and a variety of other experience centers and platforms, all focused on sports, and is a major partner of Team USA and the official sporting goods retail provider for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Emily has worked at Dick’s for about 18 months after spending over 16 years at PepsiCo in about nine different roles. Her CEO, Lauren Hobart, was appointed Dick’s CMO in 2011 and previously held that role for several years.
Tune in for a personal conversation that speaks to the positive influence of sports, something we as a community have been reminded of through watching the Olympic and Paralympic Games this year.
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This week's episode is brought to you by Deloitte.
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This week we return with one of our most anticipated episodes of the year…the 8th annual Super Bowl Advertiser Roundtable. As is tradition, Jim is joined by Gary Vaynerchuk to welcome a collection of marketing leaders behind this year’s most talked-about Super Bowl campaigns.
Our Featured Guests are…
Ahmed “Meddy” Iqbal, the Chief Marketing Officer of the Cadillac F1 Team
Gail Horwood, the Chief Marketing Officer & Chief Experience Officer of Novartis
Luis Garcia, the Chief Marketing Officer of Naterra International (Tree Hut)
Steven Saenen, the President of Savory Brands & Crackers Portfolio for Mondelez (Ritz Crackers)
Soyoung Kang, President of eos

Recorded live on the Monday after the game, in partnership with VaynerMedia’s Marketing for the Now, this conversation goes beyond the ads to explore how today’s CMOs think about boldness, experiential strategy, culture, and what it really takes to turn Super Bowl attention into long-term brand impact.
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This week's episode is brought to you by Deloitte and the IAB.

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We’re living through one of the biggest shifts in the internet since it began: a move from building content for people to building content for machines, on behalf of people. On this week’s episode, Jim Stengel is joined by James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO of Profound, and Daniel Shin Un Kang, Head of Organic and Agentic Search at Expedia, for a thoughtful, practical conversation about AI search, answer engines, and what this shift means for the future of marketing.
James founded Profound in 2024, raising $60 million and earning recognition from Redpoint Ventures as one of the most promising private AI companies shaping applied artificial intelligence. Today, Profound works with brands like US Bank, Chime, Expedia, and DocuSign to help them navigate the transition from traditional search to a world of answer engines, agents, and AI-led experiences.
After building companies and investing in high-growth technology businesses, Daniel moved from the venture world into operating at global scale. He now leads Organic and Agentic Search at Expedia, where he’s helping redefine how one of the world’s largest travel platforms shows up in AI-powered search and discovery.
Together, James and Daniel unpack how brands actually appear inside AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini, why traditional SEO metrics no longer tell the whole story, and how CMOs should rethink visibility, content, and measurement in an AI-driven world.
This episode offers a rare look at AI search from both sides of the table: the platform builder shaping the category and the operator putting it to work inside a performance-driven global brand. If you’re a CMO wondering what to focus on now, this conversation is a strong place to start.
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This week's episode is brought to you by Deloitte and the IAB.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.