Thinking out loud
Practical observations on marketing leadership, AI, global teams, and demand generation, from someone who has actually done the work.
From market research to building one of the first influencer networks, to global operations, to email marketing — what two decades in this industry actually taught me about audiences, trust, and doing the work right.
Read articlePeople often assume communication styles are universal. After working and studying in South America, Europe, and the United States, I can tell you they are not. Understanding that difference changes everything about how you lead a global team.
Read articleA company's online presence is no longer defined by a single website or profile. It is shaped by the collective experience people find when they start searching, and increasingly, what AI systems find too.
Read articleI've worked with email programs for many years. The technology keeps evolving, but a lot of the challenges stay the same. Deliverability, engagement, inbox placement. Most of the time, the platform isn't the problem. It's how the program is being managed.
Read articleThe channel hasn't changed. The accountability has. After 20 years watching this industry grow from blogger outreach to a performance channel, here's what's really different now.
Read articleAI can help summarize information, generate ideas, analyze data, and speed up tasks that once took hours. What it cannot do is replace judgment. That distinction matters more than most people realize.
Read articleI've worked with email marketing programs for many years, and one thing I keep noticing is that while the technology keeps evolving, a lot of the challenges stay surprisingly similar.
Today we have more sophisticated platforms, better automation, AI-assisted content creation, and more data than most teams know what to do with. And yet many organizations still struggle with the same things: deliverability, engagement, actually landing in the inbox.
In most cases, the platform isn't the problem. It's how the program is being managed.
List hygiene matters more than most people think
One of the most common issues I see is neglected lists. Contacts go stale. People change jobs, change email addresses, stop engaging. If you're not regularly cleaning your list and removing contacts who haven't interacted in a meaningful window of time, your bounce rate climbs and your sender reputation takes a hit. And once your reputation is damaged, even your best emails struggle to get through.
Keeping your spam complaint rate low is equally important. Most major platforms now have strict thresholds. Going over them doesn't just affect one campaign. It affects everything you send.
Spam filters are smarter than most marketers give them credit for
There's a lot of outdated thinking floating around about what triggers spam filters. One misconception I run into surprisingly often is that accents or special characters will flag an email. They won't. Email platforms are built to handle multilingual content. Writing "résumé" instead of "resume" is not going to land you in spam. Modern filters are far more sophisticated than that.
What does create problems is loading emails with heavy images and very little text, using subject lines packed with aggressive sales language, or sending to a disengaged list. Those patterns get noticed. The filter is essentially asking: does this look like something people want to receive? If the answer is no, it acts accordingly.
Warm your IPs and take the time to do it right
When you're starting with a new IP or a new sending domain, the warm-up process is not optional. Sending at full volume from day one is one of the fastest ways to tank your deliverability. You have to build a sending history gradually, establish trust with inbox providers, and let engagement signals do the work over time. It takes patience, but skipping it costs you more in the long run.
Segment your audience and talk to them like you know them
Generic email performs generically. When someone opts in for a specific topic, resource, or offer, they've told you something about what they care about. The language you use, the content you lead with, the offer you make: all of it should reflect that. Segmentation is not just a technical exercise. It's about respecting what someone raised their hand for and following through on it.
Subject lines matter too. A good hook isn't about being clever for the sake of it. It's about being relevant to the specific person reading it. That relevance comes from knowing your segments well enough to speak to each one differently.
Permission is not a technicality
One conversation I have more often than I'd like is about cold emailing people who never asked to hear from us. Event attendee lists. Scraped contacts. People whose business cards ended up in a spreadsheet somewhere. The request usually comes with good intentions. There's an event coming up, a product launch, a promotion that feels too good not to share.
The problem is that emailing people who never opted in doesn't just feel off. It actively works against you. Those contacts have no relationship with your brand. They're far more likely to mark you as spam, and even a small number of spam complaints can damage the sender reputation you've spent months building. Once that reputation takes a hit, it affects every email you send, including to the people who genuinely want to hear from you.
There are better ways to reach people at events: sponsored content, targeted ads, conversations in person, a compelling reason to opt in on the spot. Those approaches take more thought, but they don't put your entire email program at risk.
Protecting your sender reputation sometimes means saying no to a tactic that feels like a shortcut. In my experience, that conversation is always worth having.
The teams I've seen do email well aren't always the ones with the most advanced tools. They're the ones paying attention to the details, treating their list with respect, and being consistent about it over time. That combination is harder to replicate than any platform feature.
Julieta Alvarado is a marketing executive and consultant with experience in SaaS, digital media, AI-powered recruiting technology, demand generation, email marketing, and international marketing.
One thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is how much online perception now influences trust.
Not long ago, a company's website and marketing materials were often the primary sources people used to learn about a business. Today, the process looks very different.
People research companies from multiple angles before making decisions. They read Google reviews, Reddit discussions, Glassdoor feedback, BBB complaints, LinkedIn conversations, Trustpilot reviews, and social media comments. Increasingly, AI systems are doing something similar by pulling information from many sources across the web.
As a result, a company's online presence is no longer defined by a single website or profile. It is shaped by the collective experience people find when they start searching.
That experience often includes reviews and ratings, search results, candidate experiences, customer feedback, social media interactions, and how the company responds when issues arise.
What people find online starts creating a digital narrative about the organization.
This is one reason I believe reputation management, profile optimization, and local SEO have become more important than many companies realize.
These efforts are often viewed as marketing activities, but they also play a role in credibility and trust. The goal is not simply to appear in search results. The goal is to ensure that the experience people encounter online reflects the reality of the organization.
Companies that invest in their online presence early tend to be in a stronger position over time because they are actively shaping how customers, candidates, partners, and AI systems understand their brand.
A company's reputation is no longer defined solely by what it says about itself. It is increasingly influenced by the experiences, conversations, and information that exist across the web.
Julieta Alvarado is a marketing executive and consultant with experience in SaaS, digital media, AI-powered recruiting technology, demand generation, email marketing, and international marketing.
I spend a lot of time reading about AI, testing AI tools, and looking for ways AI can help marketers work more efficiently.
It's an exciting time.
But one thing I've noticed is that AI tends to be most effective when it's paired with experience.
AI can help summarize information, generate ideas, analyze data, and speed up tasks that once took hours.
What it can't do is replace judgment.
It can't tell you whether a strategy makes sense for your business. It can't understand the history behind every decision a company has made. And it can't replicate the lessons that come from years of working through successes, failures, budget constraints, leadership changes, and shifting market conditions.
I see AI as a tool, not a substitute for expertise.
The marketers who will benefit most from AI aren't necessarily the ones using the most tools. They're the ones who understand how to combine technology with experience, critical thinking, and common sense.
The future isn't about choosing between people and AI.
It's about finding the right balance between the two.
And from what I've seen so far, experience remains a valuable part of that equation.
Julieta Alvarado is a marketing executive and consultant with experience in SaaS, digital media, AI-powered recruiting technology, demand generation, email marketing, and international marketing.
Over the course of my career, I've worked and studied in South America, Europe, and the United States. One thing I've learned is that people often assume communication styles are universal. They aren't.
In France, at least in my experience, meetings often involved more debate. Challenging ideas was part of the process. Disagreement wasn't necessarily viewed as conflict. It was simply how people explored a topic before making a decision.
In the United States, there tends to be more emphasis on moving quickly and focusing on action. Discussions can be shorter and decisions often happen faster.
In Latin America, relationships frequently play a larger role in business interactions. Taking time to build trust is often just as important as the topic being discussed.
None of these approaches are right or wrong. They're simply different.
The strongest global teams I've worked with weren't the ones where everyone communicated the same way. They were the ones where people stayed curious, asked questions, and avoided making assumptions.
Today, teams collaborate across countries and time zones every day. Technical skills matter, but cultural awareness matters too.
I've found that when people take the time to understand how others communicate, projects move more smoothly and relationships become stronger.
Sometimes the most valuable skill in a global workplace is simply being willing to listen before drawing conclusions.
Julieta Alvarado is a marketing executive and consultant with experience in SaaS, digital media, AI-powered recruiting technology, demand generation, email marketing, and international marketing.
I got into this industry before anyone was calling it influencer marketing. We called the people we worked with Spokesbloggers. A colleague coined the term and it stuck, at least for us. They were content creators, bloggers, people who had built real audiences online and had genuine relationships with their readers. There were no platforms, no dashboards, no standardized contracts. Everything was built from scratch, relationship by relationship.
What I remember most about that era is that nobody could really prove it worked in the way a CFO would want. We knew it worked. You could feel it in the traffic, in the audience growth, in the way engagement would spike when the right creator published something. The creators in our network had real influence over their readers. We knew it. We just couldn't package it in a way that a finance team could easily sign off on.
What's really changed in 2026 is accountability. The channel is the same. The fundamental principle is the same. What's different is that brands can now connect creator activity to actual revenue, and they're starting to demand it.
From gut feeling to performance channel
For years, the standard way to evaluate an influencer campaign was impressions, reach, and engagement rate. Those numbers were easy to report and hard to argue with. They also didn't tell you whether anyone bought anything.
The industry is now moving away from that, and pretty decisively. According to Sprout Social, 74% of brands are now tracking direct sales from their influencer campaigns. That's a significant shift. It means the conversation in the boardroom has changed from "our campaign reached two million people" to "our campaign drove this many conversions at this cost per acquisition."
That's a harder conversation to have, and a better one. It forces everyone to be more precise about what success actually looks like before the campaign starts, not after.
Most campaigns don't fail because of the channel
In my experience, when influencer marketing underperforms, the campaign setup and measurement are almost always where things went wrong, not the channel itself.
The most common mistake I still see is using last-touch attribution for influencer campaigns. That model gives all the credit to whatever touchpoint directly preceded the conversion. In influencer marketing, that almost never captures the full picture. A creator might introduce someone to a brand weeks before they buy. If you're only looking at the last click, that creator's contribution disappears completely, and the next time budgets are reviewed, influencer gets cut because it "didn't perform."
The brands seeing the strongest results right now are using layered attribution models that account for the full customer journey. They're tracking UTM parameters, affiliate links, unique promo codes, and post-purchase surveys that ask customers how they first heard about the product. Put together, that gives you a much more honest picture of where influence is actually happening.
The creator relationship still matters more than the platform
Something that hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will, is that the best influencer campaigns are built on real relationships, not transactions.
Long-term creator partnerships consistently outperform one-off posts, both in engagement and in conversion. When a creator has been working with a brand for months or years, their audience can tell the difference between a sponsored post and a genuine recommendation. That trust transfers. A single authentic mention from a creator who actually uses your product will outperform a polished, one-off sponsored post from someone with ten times the following.
I learned this early, in those first years of building creator networks. The creators who drove the most value were the ones we'd invested in building real relationships with, the ones who understood what we were trying to do and believed in it. That dynamic hasn't changed. The platforms have. The tools have. The underlying human element has not.
What I'd watch in the months ahead
A couple of things are worth paying attention to right now. AI is starting to show up as a discovery channel, with platforms like ChatGPT testing in-platform advertising and search becoming more conversational. That has real implications for how influencer content gets found and how awareness gets attributed. It's early, but it's worth understanding how your content is showing up in AI-generated responses, not just in traditional search results.
There's also a meaningful shift happening around where creators are building their audiences. Private communities, subscriber-only content, exclusive access models. Thirty-five percent of creators are now actively moving their most engaged followers into gated spaces. For brands, that's worth paying attention to. The reach is smaller and the relationship is deeper. Whether that works for your goals depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish.
Twenty years ago, I was cold-calling bloggers and trying to explain why they should trust us enough to join a network nobody had heard of. The channel has come a long way. The fundamentals that made it work back then, trust, relevance, a genuine connection between the creator and the audience, are exactly what make it work now.
The difference is that we can finally show our work.
Julieta Alvarado is a marketing executive and consultant with experience in SaaS, digital media, AI-powered recruiting technology, demand generation, email marketing, and international marketing.