CMO Uncovered

In 2004, the U.S. homeownership rate averaged 69%. By 2025, it was 65.2%. During the first quarter of 2025, 46.1 million American households rented their homes, and nearly half spent more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Making the idea of homeownership feel unobtainable. 

The founders of Bilt saw this pressure amongst their own friend circles, and decided to build a company centered on essential expenses, because the milestones their parents had reached were becoming increasingly harder for their generation to afford. 

Bilt emerged to let people earn rewards on the rent they are already paying. Points could go towards travel or a future downpayment, giving members something back from an expense that typically offered little beyond a roof over their head. 

For Zoe Oz, Bilt’s CMO, the marketing challenge began with education. This was something completely new. People understand airline miles and credit card points but rewards on rent required some explaining. 

Traditional advertising would not build the company they envisioned. Instead, Bilt developed relationships with property owners and managers to be integrated in how people pay rent, placing the company inside an exiting habit. 

Once members enter the Bilt ecosystem, the next challenge is figuring out what the renter will need next. 

Most businesses struggle to establish enough value to get a customer, Bilt acquired customers to make a rent payment. 

However, residents might use Bilt every month without understanding much about the actual membership. They know where to go to pay rent but have no idea Bilt offers benefits like at restaurants or fitness studios. 

When someone first moves into a new place there are immediate concerns: payments, maintenance, or package delivery. Messaging about pharmacy rewards will be useful eventually but probably not right away. That changes strategy for lifecycle marketing. Bilt has to decide which benefit is worth introducing when people are actually ready to use them. 

Making the First of the Month Hit Different

Around the first of the month, customers opened the app to pay rent and check their email to make sure the rent went through. This is a dependable point of contact which was also attached to dread. 

Rent Day was born from that observation. Bilt introduces bonuses, experiences, special releases - including A$AP Rocky vinyl - to make the first feel special instead of dreadful. 

Bilt has larger ambitions around neighborhood partnerships. Zoe describes restaurant checks that come with a complimentary Lyft ride home. The value grows when it helps members do something they already want to do. 

The monthly rent payment gives Bilt a recurring place but what happens beyond that payment determines how far the relationship will go. 

• How distribution changes the marketing problem. 

• How useful information can have bad timing.

• Why your own routine can hide customer needs. 

• Why experienced users make valuable testers.

• How an existing habit can support a new ritual. 

The market around Scribd, Inc. is not as tidy as “documents.” It sits inside a much larger fight over how people learn, research and decide what to trust online. The global e-learning services market is projected to grow from $426 billion in 2026 to more than $1.7 trillion by 2034. Digital publishing is expected to reach nearly $280 billion over the same period. Add AI answer engines, search, study tools and workplace research platforms, and the real category becomes harder to name but easier to understand.

For years, Scribd had the kind of user intent most brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture. People arrived with a need already in hand. They were looking for a manual, a source, a study aid or a document they could not easily find somewhere else. They searched, landed on Scribd, found what they needed and moved on.

The company occupied a valuable position in the search-led web, where a user might end up after asking a specific question, when an answer still required a source and the source still required reading.

Nearly twenty years later, that world has changed. Search is no longer a simple doorway between curiosity and destination. A person may ask a question and never leave the results page. A summary may appear before the source. An AI agent may decide which information is worth recommending before the user ever sees the options.

That brings us to Scribd CMO, Gemma Craven, and their first major brand campaign, “Connect the Docs.” The campaign is aimed at students and educators, but the question underneath is larger than education. What happens when getting an answer becomes easier than understanding one?

That is what makes Scribd’s moment interesting. The company is trying to move from a utility people find by accident to a brand people choose on purpose, while attaching feeling to a behavior that has become almost unfashionable in the age of instant answers.

This is the question growth leaders now have to answer. When discovery is shaped by search summaries, AI agents, reviews, Reddit threads and every public trace a company leaves behind, how much of the brand still belongs to the brand?

TL;DR

• Search did the selling: For years, Scribd didn’t need brand love. People Googled what they needed, landed on Scribd and moved on.

• The AI plot twist: Instead of making Scribd obsolete, quick answers sent more people looking for source material, verification and depth.

• From library to workspace: Gemma says Scribd is moving from a passive library to a knowledge workspace where people find, learn and finish the thing.

• Your next customer may be a machine: Brands now have human audiences and machine audiences. An AI agent may decide if you matter before a person ever clicks.

• Reputation is the new homepage: Reddit threads, app store reviews, customer service, YouTube, press and Wikipedia all shape what the internet thinks you are.

• Thinking is worth saving: Scribd’s first major brand campaign is built around the joy of figuring something out yourself. A little radical in the age of instant answers.

The baby gear industry generates roughly $356 billion annually, a number expected to reach $580 billion by 2033. And that doesn’t include diapers and formula. We’re talking about strollers, carriers, bags and all the other necessary parenting accessories. 

Every irritating, painful, exhausting little moment of raising children has become opportunity for product development. 

In 2018, Tushbaby launched around one of the most universal; carrying a 20-pound toddler on your hip. I spent seven years carrying three boys that way, with one hip jutting out to keep a hand free. The result was chronic wrist, shoulder and back pain. If Tushbaby existed in 2010, I would have purchased one instantly. 

However, in a $356 billion industry, it’s not enough to find the problem, that’s just the start.

Parents are surrounded by product choices, and it’s difficult lift for a brand to convince a parent they need what you’re selling. 

That was the challenge Sara Azadi stepped into as Tushbaby’s co-founder and CMO. The company arrived during what she describes as the Wild West of direct-to-consumer. Brands could move quickly, acquire customers cheaply and build awareness without traditional retail presence. 

As the DTC playbook became more expensive and crowded, Sara’s job got more difficult. 

• The death of lifecycle marketing: Consumers are increasingly turning to AI-mediated shopping, fundamentally changing how brands acquire and retain customers.

• Exhaust your copycats: If you can’t win on price, beat them with better quality, safety, brand confidence and constant product improvement. 

• Listen to your fans: When your customers show you other ways they’re using your product, listen. Tushpuppy sold out in weeks of launching. 

• Don’t over-build your team: Build a lean team with cross-functional understanding. Things change too quickly for narrow focused experts. 👆🏽 Case-in-point to the role of a lifecycle marketer. 

• Career Advice: Build a jungle gym, not a ladder.

Liz Armistead leads brand at Dropbox, a product used by more than 700 million people. But her approach to marketing starts somewhere much smaller: with the person on the other side of the work.

In this episode of CMO Uncovered, Liz explains how Dropbox studies real customer behavior before writing the brief, why the best creator partnerships require brands to give up control, and the rule she uses to evaluate every collaboration: “If this feels like a commercial, we’ve failed.”

She also shares the story behind Dropbox’s work with Fred again.., who asked fans to put away their phones during his USB tour and trusted that professional photos and videos would arrive afterward in a Dropbox folder. The result was a campaign built around presence, community and a product that did its job without demanding attention.

Liz also explores how AI is changing creative work. Her team uses it to accelerate research, reduce reporting and create more options, but she believes judgment and taste are becoming more valuable, not less.

The conversation also covers Dropbox’s Sundance strategy, the emotional side of sharing unfinished work, and why the clearest idea in customer research may also be the most forgettable.

Rick Galasieski does not believe great marketing comes from instinct alone. At Super.com, the gut may surface an idea, but the data decides whether it deserves investment.

In this episode of CMO Uncovered, Rick shares how Super.com evaluates bold brand bets, from airport and subway takeovers to its NASCAR partnership. He explains why marketers often grow tired of a message before customers have even noticed it, how repetition drives action and why every campaign must meet the customer where they already are.

The conversation also explores the growth of Super Plus, the membership program approaching one million paying members, and the checkout insight that helped turn a one-time travel purchase into an ongoing customer relationship.

It is a conversation about experimentation, retention and the discipline required to make brand earn its keep.

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This season of CMO Uncovered is supported by CleverTap. CleverTap is the world’s leading engagement platform, helping brands build meaningful relationships through data-driven personalization. Powering over 2,000 customers globally, CleverTap’s AI-powered engine processes billions of data points daily to help marketers predict behavior and automate engagement at scale. From onboarding to advocacy, CleverTap provides the infrastructure needed to optimize every stage of the customer journey. For the CMOs building the next generation of iconic brands, CleverTap offers the precision and scale required to win in a crowded market. To learn more, visit clevertap.com.

CMO Uncovered: Jean Brandolini-Lamb, EquityZen

When Cerebras went public, roughly 1,400 EquityZen investors saw a 5.6x return on shares they'd bought starting in 2020. It's the kind of proof point most marketers would build an entire campaign around. Jean Brandolini-Lamb can't use it to promote a single deal.

In this episode, the CMO of EquityZen (now part of Morgan Stanley) breaks down what it means to grow a platform in one of fintech's most regulated corners, where you can't recommend investments, can't target users who haven't opted in, and where most of your audience doesn't even know your market exists. Her answer: build category awareness before brand awareness, treat compliance as a creative partner rather than a gatekeeper, and let zero-party data drive a consent-based marketing model that filters for the responsible investor instead of chasing the next hot thing.

Jean also shares her unlikely path from art galleries to JP Morgan and TIAA, how an education-first help center accidentally became an AI search advantage, why her product partner is her first call every morning, and where she'd put $100,000 if compliance weren't a constraint (spoiler: video, and lots of it).

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This season of CMO Uncovered is supported by CleverTap. CleverTap is the world’s leading engagement platform, helping brands build meaningful relationships through data-driven personalization. Powering over 2,000 customers globally, CleverTap’s AI-powered engine processes billions of data points daily to help marketers predict behavior and automate engagement at scale. From onboarding to advocacy, CleverTap provides the infrastructure needed to optimize every stage of the customer journey. For the CMOs building the next generation of iconic brands, CleverTap offers the precision and scale required to win in a crowded market. To learn more, visit clevertap.com.

Three Fintech Marketing Leaders on what changes when AI agents replace browsers, trust replaces funnels, and taste becomes the last competitive edge.

Ashley Kiolbasa didn’t hesitate when she told a crowd gathered on the rooftop terrace at 2 Penn that the rules of marketing have been rewritten.

“We as people have stopped browsing the internet completely. We’ve offloaded that chore to AI without even thinking about it, and that fundamentally changes the customer journey.”

She was one of three marketing leaders on stage at the Big Leap VIP Experience during New York Fintech Week, where CMO Uncovered recorded a live panel conversation sponsored by CleverTap. Nicole Casperson, Founder and CEO of Fintech Is Femme, moderated an ESPN-inspired round robin panel designed by Drew Glover, Co-Founder of Fiat Growth:

• 5 provocative topics

• 3 operators

• 0 rehearsed answers

The panelists: Veronica Mendoza, VP of Growth Marketing at Betterment, an online investment platform making financial advice accessible and affordable. Kathryn Flynn, VP of Marketing at Zip, a buy now, pay later company focused on serving America’s underserved population. And Ashley, the CMO of Prove, a digital identity company that helps businesses verify people are real.

Before the panel kicked off, Anand Jain, Co-Founder of CleverTap, took the stage to mark Big Leap’s second year. “In the world of notifications, emails, everything that you can’t see and touch, we have launched a magazine,” he said, holding up CleverTap’s first print publication to cheers from the crowd.

In this Episode

Katie Perry transitioned from the high-stakes retail investment frenzy of public.com during the 2021 GameStop era to the foundational infrastructure of digital assets. Now the Chief Marketing Officer of zerohash, she focuses on the “plumbing” that allows banks, brokerages, and fintechs to embed digital assets into their ecosystems. After a successful period of independent consulting using AI-agentic systems, she joined zerohash—an eight-year-old company boasting clients like Morgan Stanley and Franklin Templeton that had achieved deep product-market fit but lacked a formal narrative architecture.

Katie is driven by high-intensity curiosity and thrives on functional contrast.

The Uncovered Profile: Katie’s Ideal State

The Intellectual Sponge: Her routines range from 6 a.m. runs in Tokyo's Ginza district to late-night deep dives into 18th-century medical history or British period dramas.

Functional Contrast: She finds equal inspiration in her Midtown Manhattan production studio and the unpolished energy of a NASCAR race. Katie believes that while technology can automate tasks, it cannot replace the human instinct to explore, learn, and connect.

The Mechanics of the Build

zerohash provides the technology and licenses for companies to offer crypto functionality without building from scratch. Katie likens the company to YKK zippers: ubiquitous, essential, and only noticed if they fail. The business relies on three product pillars:

1. Trading: Allowing platforms like interactive brokers to offer digital assets
2. Transactions: Facilitating instant cross-border payments via stablecoins (stablecoin volumes have jumped 170% YoY in their ecosystem).
3. Tokenization: Enabling financial institutions to explore emerging asset management strategies.

The Logic of the Pivot

Transitioning from B2C to B2B marketing required moving from broad data science to surgical, relationship-based strategy targeting a smaller pool of executive decision-makers. Empathy remains the common thread: identifying the specific anxieties that keep partners awake. For zerohash, this means absorbing regulatory burdens. By holding licenses in 52 U.S. jurisdictions, zerohash provides a regulatory moat that allows partners to focus purely on their user experience.

Code as Culture

While AI now handles manual marketing tasks, Katie emphasizes that these tools still require a human architect.

The AI "Hater": She frequently uses LLMs to pressure-test ideas, prompting the AI to act as a skeptical lawyer to identify campaign weaknesses in minutes.

Increased Output: AI efficiency hasn't led to less work; it has enabled deeper exploration and higher-fidelity output, such as a recent 60-page book on stablecoins produced in a fraction of the traditional time.

The Future of the Interface

Traditional finance and decentralized finance are converging, shifting from an "us versus them" narrative to active collaboration by institutions like BlackRock. As the industry scales digitally, Katie leans into high-integrity, offline human experiences. While AI allows for infinite messaging variations, it cannot replace the trust forged during a shared dinner or an event like the World Cup.

"The LLMs need to be organized, architected. There needs to be a system and a way of thinking that you apply to how you’re using them. I’m ideally trying to train these things to have very broad knowledge of our business and our partners’ problems, broader than I could ever have as a single human."