I didn't start in marketing. I started in market research, doing qualitative work focused on the Hispanic and Asian markets, overseeing focus groups, managing phone interviews, listening to people talk about their experiences with telecom companies, software, cereal brands, products that companies were actively trying to market to these communities. It was fascinating work, and it gave me something I've carried through every role since: a genuine curiosity about how people actually think, not just what they say they think.
Those two things are very different, by the way. And learning to tell them apart early on changed how I approach marketing.
What experts say and what users experience are not the same thing
I remember doing usability research for a well-known design software company. I already knew from personal experience, and from conversations with friends, that the product was incredibly hard to use. You needed serious training just to get started. But when we surveyed the professionals who used it every day, the feedback was largely positive. They loved it.
That wasn't wrong. It just wasn't the full picture. Those users had spent years learning the product. They'd grown up with it professionally. What felt intuitive to them was completely opaque to someone coming in fresh. We were asking the wrong people, or at least not asking enough of the right ones.
That lesson has stayed with me. Know who you're actually asking. And make sure the people you're learning from represent the audience you're actually trying to reach.
I was part of something before it had a name
After market research, I made a shift into digital marketing, which at the time was still very much figuring itself out. Ad serving was done manually. There were no playbooks. Influencer marketing as a concept didn't exist yet. A colleague of mine at the time coined the term "Spokesbloggers." That's what we called them. Content creators, bloggers, people who had built real audiences online and had genuine relationships with their readers. That word never quite caught on the way "influencer" did, but honestly it was more accurate.
I was part of a team that helped build one of the largest influencer networks in the US at the time. We were considered a bit of a unicorn in Silicon Valley, which was exciting and terrifying in equal measure, because we were building something without a map.
What I learned during that period had nothing to do with marketing tactics and everything to do with trust. When I would approach content creators about joining our network, most of them had never heard of us. There were other companies with bigger names, more established reputations. Why would anyone sign with us?
The answer was that I didn't lead with the pitch. I led with the relationship. I took the time to understand what they were building, what they cared about, what would actually be valuable to them. By the time I got to the business conversation, it wasn't really a sell anymore. It was a natural next step.
Working across cultures changed how I think about everything
Eventually I was sent to France to manage our operations there, and then took on responsibility for other markets across Europe and beyond. It was one of the most formative experiences of my career, and also one of the hardest.
Working across cultures teaches you very quickly that the way you communicate, make decisions, and build relationships is not the only way. In France, disagreement in a meeting is part of the process. It doesn't mean things are falling apart. It means people are engaging seriously with the problem. In the US, we tend to want to move fast and align quickly. In Latin America, the relationship often has to come before the business conversation, not after it.
None of those approaches are wrong. They're just different. The mistake is assuming your way is the default and everyone else is the exception.
I also learned a lot about execution under pressure during this time. Running campaigns across multiple countries, working with content creators in different time zones, managing different legal requirements, different platforms, different audience expectations. It forces you to get very organized, very fast. You learn what can be standardized and what has to be adapted. And you learn that the people on the ground in each market are almost always smarter about their audience than you are.
Email is where strategy and execution actually meet
After the global chapter, I moved into a role where I put a lot of my accumulated knowledge into practice through email marketing, and honestly, I've been a little obsessed with it ever since.
People have been declaring email dead for as long as I can remember. It's still here. And in my experience, it remains one of the highest-ROI channels in marketing when it's done with any degree of care and intelligence. At one company I worked with, somewhere between 30 and 33 percent of total revenue was coming directly from email campaigns. Not from ads. Not from social. From email.
What I've found is that most email programs underperform not because of the platform they're on, but because of how they're being managed. People don't clean their lists. They send the same message to everyone regardless of what they actually opted in for. They load emails with images and wonder why they're landing in spam. They ignore IP warming and then can't understand why their deliverability collapsed.
And then there's the conversation I have constantly with sales teams who want to blast event attendee lists or scraped contacts. I understand the impulse. There's an event, there's a list, there's a product to promote. It feels like an opportunity. But emailing people who never asked to hear from you doesn't just underperform. It actively damages the sender reputation you've spent months building. And once that reputation is damaged, it affects every email you send, including to the people who genuinely want to hear from you.
You can't burn trust you never earned. That applies to email as much as anything else.
The advice I'd give anyone starting out today
If there's one thing I wish someone had told me early in my career, it's this: take the time to understand the technical side of whatever you're doing before you start executing on it.
Marketing moves fast and there's always pressure to just go. But the marketers I've seen do this job really well, the ones who can walk into any situation and figure out what's possible, are the ones who took the time to understand how things actually work under the hood: how the platforms function, what the data is actually measuring, what happens when you push a particular lever.
That technical knowledge doesn't replace creativity or strategy. It makes both of them better, because you know what you're actually working with. You can see the limitations of a plan before you're halfway through executing it. You can have a real conversation with your tech team because you understand what they're talking about. And you can make better decisions faster, which in marketing is often the whole game.
Twenty years in, I'm still learning. The channels change, the tools change, and the platforms change. What doesn't change are the fundamentals: understanding your audience, earning their attention, respecting their trust, and knowing your craft. Those are the things that I believe help us, marketers, build something that lasts.