That's What I Call Marketing

Gemma Craven, Chief Marketing Officer at Scribd, Inc., joins That’s What I Call Marketing to discuss her path to becoming a CMO, the value of building experience across different areas of marketing and what it takes to reshape brands, teams and reputations.

This episode explores how a varied career across PR, social media, technology, agencies, consultancy and in-house leadership gave Gemma the range required to lead marketing across Scribd, Everand, Fable and SlideShare. It is an honest conversation about career choices that did not always make immediate sense to other people.

In this episode, we cover:
– How moving between countries, disciplines and organisations shaped Gemma’s approach to marketing leadership
– Building Social@Ogilvy New York when many people still believed social media would not last
– Why Gemma deliberately moved beyond being known solely as a social media specialist
– How working with CMOs at McCann helped her see CMO leadership as a possible destination
– Why becoming a fractional CMO was initially viewed as a failure by some people
– Restructuring Scribd’s marketing organisation around its products, audiences and areas of expertise
– Managing a portfolio that includes Scribd, Everand, Fable and SlideShare
– Why brands must actively manage their reputations rather than leave customers, reviews and online communities to define them
– Connecting brand strategy more closely with product, engineering, design and customer experience
– The thinking behind Scribd’s “Connect the Docs” campaign and the enduring human satisfaction of figuring something out for yourself

Gemma Craven has more than 25 years of experience building and positioning global brands. Before joining Scribd, Inc., she led marketing at Melissa & Doug, advised senior leaders at companies including Spotify, Nike, Fiverr and Ford, and led digital brand strategy at McCann New York, where she helped make Fearless Girl a global phenomenon. She also built Social@Ogilvy New York into an award-winning, multi-practice division. A useful listen for marketers interested in marketing leadership, career development, brand strategy, organisational design, reputation management, customer experience and the path to becoming a CMO.

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.
Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Tracksuit, the always-on brand-tracking platform that helps marketers monitor brand health and bring a clear, shared view of brand performance into the boardroom. Tracksuit tracks brands across more than 25 markets, making ongoing brand measurement more accessible, visible and useful for marketing teams and senior leaders. Find out more at: https://www.gotracksuit.com

The Big Marketing MeetUp Belfast, takes place at ICC Belfast on 5 November 2026, book tickets at: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bmmubelfast/1935249

Chapters

04:15 – A career shaped by curiosity and working across cultures
06:30 – Moving from London to New York and experiencing culture shock
09:41 – Building Social@Ogilvy New York
16:42 – Why Gemma moved from agency life into technology
19:24 – When becoming a CMO started to feel possible
20:49 – Why varied experience creates better marketing leaders
23:13 – Too ambitious to work for Mick Jagger
24:01 – Choosing the fractional CMO path
28:11 – Restructuring marketing around products and audiences
29:17 – What happens when a brand leaves its story untold
29:48 – Leading teams through organisational change
32:16 – Refreshing the Scribd and SlideShare brands
32:24 – The strategy behind “Connect the Dots”
36:26 – Resisting the pressure to launch a campaign too quickly
38:06 – How brand discovery and reputation are changing

That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Conor Byrne hosts another “Singles” episode with Bella and Ed from Tracksuit, using brand tracking data to unpack the biggest marketing stories of the moment—what’s genuinely driving brand growth, what’s just noise, and where brands are taking real risks. From Monzo’s bold “Get Busy Living” brand campaign in a fiercely competitive banking market, to the clever Heinz x Heineken collaboration built for summer BBQ culture, they explore how creativity and brand equity show up in the metrics. They also break down quick-fire eclipse “culture-jacking” wins from brands like Starbucks, Netflix and Mastercard, before debating the backlash and brand danger around Meta-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses. Finally, they launch “What the Actual?”—spotlighting recent brand missteps from Target and a Callaway/Good Good promo—and invite listeners to submit their own.

02:05 Monzo Brand Campaign
13:02 Heinz Heineken Collab
18:37 Solar Eclipse Marketing
22:55 Meta Ray Ban Glasses
27:28 What The Actual Fails

Check out tracksuit https://www.gotracksuit.com/

That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.

Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Hurman, author of Future Demand and co-founder of Tracksuit, joins That’s What I Call Marketing to explain how brand building creates future demand, how performance marketing converts current demand and why marketers need both to drive sustainable growth. This episode offers a practical way to understand how advertising really works, how to build the internal case for brand investment and how marketers can move an organisation beyond a performance-only mindset without betting everything on one dramatic change.
In this episode, we cover:
– Why James Hurman rewrote Future Demand specifically for marketers
– The relationship between brand building, future demand and performance marketing
– Why advertising rarely causes an immediate sale but can help a brand win a greater share of future sales
– How Instacart CMO Laura Jones “marched up the funnel” from measurable performance activity to the Olympics and the Super Bowl
– How Telstra tested a 50:50 brand and performance split in Adelaide and recorded a 14% improvement against the rest of Australia
– How marketers can use experiments, geographic holdouts and better measurement to demonstrate incrementality
– Why CEOs, CFOs and marketers often want the same commercial outcome but describe marketing investment in very different language
– What AI, agentic shopping, AEO and GEO could change — and why the fundamentals of markets, brands and human decision-making still matter
James challenges the traditional idea that advertising works by persuading somebody to buy immediately. Instead, he describes a two-stage process: brand advertising creates familiarity and positive bias among people who are not yet in the market, while performance activity helps convert that existing bias when they are ready to buy.
He also shares practical examples of how marketers can earn confidence gradually, measure brand investment more rigorously and communicate its commercial value to non-marketing stakeholders.

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.
Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
CHAPTERS
03:47 Exploring what a marketing book can be
05:40 Why James rewrote Future Demand
07:39 Creating future demand and converting current demand
08:29 Laura Jones and Instacart’s four-year brand journey
11:03 How Instacart “marched up the funnel”
12:00 Telstra’s geographic holdout test in Adelaide
14:16 Making marketing science easier to understand
16:11 The wrong mental model for advertising
17:44 How advertising creates and converts demand
19:06 Is advertising really a weak force?
20:07 Why the evidence has not changed every organisation
21:43 Winning support from non-marketing stakeholders
23:38 Creating a shared language with CFOs
25:18 Why James remains invested in solving this problem
26:56 How marketing cultures differ across markets
29:53 Better marketing measurement and experimentation
31:27 Using AI to learn and improve marketing capability
34:14 How AI is affecting businesses and marketing
37:21 Will agentic shopping change consumer behaviour?
39:58 Familiarity, emotion and why people choose brands
40:58 What McDonald’s “brand love” metric predicts
42:19 Tracksuit University and the language of the boardroom
44:25 Where to find Future Demand
ABOUT JAMES HURMAN
James Hurman is the author of Future Demand and The Case for Creativity. He is a co-founder of Tracksuit and founding partner of innovation studio Previously Unavailable. His work focuses on marketing effectiveness, creativity, brand building and helping businesses understand how marketing contributes to long-term commercial growth.
Explore Future Demand: https://future-demand.com
Learn more about Tracksuit: https://www.gotracksuit.com
Visit Tracksuit University: https://university.gotracksuit.com
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Kingsley, brand strategist, designer, author and founder of Malcontent, joins That’s What I Call Marketing to discuss his book "Brands in the Age of AI" and why marketers need to think much more deeply about artificial intelligence than prompts, productivity and tools.

Mark’s central argument is that AI is not simply a tool, it is a condition, an environment that is already changing how we work, create, build brands and relate to one another. This conversation explores what that means for brand strategy, creativity, marketing careers and the relationship between companies and customers.

Rather than offering another AI how-to guide that could be outdated within months, Mark draws on history, philosophy, psychology, design and technology to understand where AI fits into a much longer story of technological change.

In this episode, we cover:
– What the Jacquard loom, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and even *Frankenstein* can teach us about today’s AI debate
– AI-driven job losses, automation and the continued commoditisation of creative and knowledge work
– Why removing junior-level “donkey work” could create a serious skills and judgement problem for agencies, marketers and professional services
– Brian Eno’s idea of “scenius” and why creativity is rarely the product of a lone genius
– Agentic AI, B2A2C commerce and what happens when AI agents begin making purchasing decisions
– Why brands could use AI to move beyond transactions towards deeper relationships with people
– Why human discernment could become more valuable as AI becomes more capable
– The danger of treating AI primarily as another system for extracting efficiency and profit
– How AI might instead be used to support human flourishing

One of the most important questions running through the conversation is what happens to expertise when AI starts doing the work through which people traditionally learned their craft.

We also explore what AI means for brands themselves. If brands genuinely want relationships rather than simply transactions, Mark argues AI could help companies recognise people as individuals and members of communities rather than merely customers to extract value from.

A useful listen for marketers interested in AI in marketing, brand strategy, creativity, marketing leadership, agentic AI, synthetic research, the future of work, customer experience and the changing role of human judgement.

02:32 Why this is not another AI how-to book
04:36 “AI is not a tool, it’s a condition”
05:43 Technology, Heidegger and what technology reveals
07:38 Is AI already changing society at scale?
08:01 Alan Turing and the history of machine intelligence
09:02 Jacquard looms, the Luddites and automation
11:04 AI layoffs and the economics of replacing people
13:36 AI infrastructure and removing barriers
19:13 Photography, creativity and resistance to new technology
20:18 Why great photographers and creatives still matter
21:24 Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies
25:18 Agentic AI and B2A2C commerce
26:00 AI personas and purchasing agents
27:02 Tokenisation and the “semiotic gap” between humans and agents
30:48 Why Mark is disappointed by the adversarial AI debate
34:13 What *Brands in the Age of AI* ultimately asks brands to reconsider

This episode is brought to you by Tracksuit the always-on brand tracking platform for clients and agencies.

Find out more: https://www.gotracksuit.com

More from That’s What I Call Marketing

That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.

Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.

Find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Meghan Gendelman, CMO, B2B at Canva, joins That’s What I Call Marketing to discuss B2B marketing, enterprise growth, building demand and how Canva is taking a hugely successful product-led business further into the enterprise. This conversation gets into what building a B2B growth engine actually requires: understanding customers, combining product-led and sales-led growth, building brand before buyers enter the market, using data properly and working out where AI genuinely adds value.

In this episode, we cover:
– Why Meghan believes B2B marketing is anything but boring, particularly when you are dealing with complex buying committees, long consideration periods and multiple decision-makers
– Why customer insight still matters more than tools, including Meghan’s experience of using AI to scale content for GEO and discovering that faster content without anything new or useful simply didn’t work
– How brand, customer entry points and buying signals help marketers influence customers long before they reach a website or speak to sales
– Why Meghan believes every good marketer needs to become comfortable with data, pipeline and the commercial numbers behind the business
– How Canva is thinking about AI, LLMs, design, brand governance and integrations with platforms including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini
– What Meghan learned from more than a decade at Salesforce, her time at DocuSign and the process that led her to become Canva’s first B2B CMO
– How she leads global marketing teams through clear values, trust, vulnerability and knowing the difference between “smoke” and “fire”

We also discuss the changing B2B buying journey, why much of the decision can happen before a buyer identifies themselves, the role of brand in demand generation and why B2B and B2C marketing are becoming less distinct than marketers sometimes assume.
A useful listen for marketers interested in B2B marketing, enterprise marketing, product-led growth, demand generation, brand building, AI in marketing, customer insight, sales and marketing, marketing leadership and commercial growth.

02:12 Meghan’s career across Salesforce, DocuSign and Canva
03:03 Why everything starts with the customer
05:44 The AI and GEO content experiment that failed
07:18 Why B2B marketing is not boring
10:30 Leading global marketing teams through values and trust
11:41 Smoke, fire and knowing when leaders need to get involved
12:47 Why Meghan joined Canva
14:46 Canva’s 30–40 hour B2B marketing interview challenge
16:15 Taking Canva from product-led growth into enterprise
17:04 Product-led growth versus sales-led growth
19:47 How B2B buying decisions are changing
22:08 Why every marketer needs to understand data
23:13 Meghan’s Monday morning pipeline ritual
24:21 Learning from other marketing leaders
25:00 Remote work, offices and building global teams
27:39 Why EMEA is not one market
28:40 Keeping Canva simple as the platform expands
29:11 Canva as an AI-powered design platform
30:27 Canva, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the LLM ecosystem
31:47 Building Canva’s B2B and enterprise brand

About Meghan Gendelman
B2B at Canva, leading its B2B marketing strategy as Canva continues to grow its enterprise business. Before Canva, Meghan held senior marketing roles at DocuSign and spent more than 12 years at Salesforce across areas including customer success, product marketing, growth marketing, field marketing, demand generation and regional marketing leadership.

This episode was recorded as part of the That’s What I Call Marketing Cannes Sessions and produced in partnership with The Digital Voice.
The Digital Voice: https://www.thedigitalvoice.co.uk/
That’s What I Call Marketing is the podcast for marketers who care about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Follow the show for more conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, professors, authors, thinkers and practitioners.
Find more episodes at:
https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
That’s What I Call Marketing is where marketers come for real conversations about brand, B2B, creativity, effectiveness and the future of the profession.
Hosted by Conor Byrne, the show features conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, agency leaders, authors, thinkers and practitioners about what good marketing looks like in practice.

Listen, follow and find more episodes at: https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrneirl/
If you enjoy the show, please follow, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more marketers find the conversations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.