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B2B Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Boring
October 23, 2026 Career Development Creative Agency Creative Marketing Creative Strategy Creative Team Leadership Design Leadership Digital Innovation Teamwork
Featuring
Chris Koehler, CMO, Twilio

Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer of Twilio, where he leads marketing for the customer engagement platform and has made “Be Bold” a strategic pillar for his team. He has held roles across sales engineering, product, customer success, and marketing, including a decade at Adobe, where he ran the sales engineering organization and go-to-market for Creative Cloud Enterprise. He previously served as CMO of Box and began his career in database marketing at SunTrust (now Truist) and E*Trade. Chris advocates for the important connection between creative development and business objectives and often appears in Twilio’s own content to encourage teams to take creative risks.

B2B Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Boring

Many B2B brands love to play it safe — but in a market flooded with AI-generated content, “safe” quickly becomes forgettable.

In this episode, Adam Morgan interviews his boss — no pressure.

Luckily, Twilio CMO Chris Koehler is game, including starring in his own brand’s content. The two share a belief that B2B doesn’t have to be boring, and they discuss how to make that belief stick: in the work, in the team, and when there’s a budget to defend.

Takeaways

  • Why copying competitors leaves your brand with nothing to say
  • How to pitch creative in a language the C-suite understands: business outcomes
  • How to keep teams from rejecting their own best ideas before you hear them
  • What joining in the joke signals to your team
  • Why AI should raise the quality bar, not just the content count

Watch the conversation, and reconsider the idea you talked yourself out of.

View Transcript
mentioned in this show:
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Adam Morgan
Creative Leader and RCL Host
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The Stoke Group
Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency
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REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 7

Episode: 4

Episode Title: B2B Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Boring

Guest Title:
Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio

Adam Morgan

Welcome back to Real Creative Leadership. This one is a little different for me because today’s guest isn’t just someone well-known in the industry or a marketing leader I’ve worked with. He’s my boss. Chris Kohler is the CMO of Twilio, and one of the things I appreciated most about working with him is that he doesn’t just believe that B2B has to be boring or straightforward.

He wants the work to be bold. He wants it to feel human, and he’s willing to put himself out there, literally sometimes, to make that happen. Chris and I have already talked publicly about the strategy behind Twilio’s Builders Wanted brand. Today I want to go somewhere different, into the leadership behind that work.

Why B2B marketing so often defaults to safe, and how leaders create permission to break that pattern. I want to talk about what strong CMO/creative leader partnerships look like when you’re out there balancing brand and business outcomes and creative risk. And finally, we’re going to talk about how AI is changing the pace of marketing and why agility and judgment and taste and a builder mindset matter more than ever.

Hello, Chris. Welcome to Real Creative Leadership.

Chris Kohler

Thank you, Adam. This is gonna be super fun.

Adam Morgan

Excellent.

Okay, Chris, we’ve worked together for a while now, but our audience may not know you very well from the CMO side. So what kind of experiences have shaped you as a leader today? And tell us a little bit more about your path and how you got to where you are.

Chris Kohler

Yeah. I guess I have a pretty, I would say, non-traditional path into the office of the CMO, where I spent a lot of years both on the client side engaging with customers.

My first job out of college was, if we really think about this, it was using census data to do geo-segmentation. So how imprecise is that and how far we’ve come, where literally it was like everyone in a zip code has the same attributes, and so you talk to them the same way, which you think about today is just unfathomable.

And I was lucky enough to get on the brand side, on the B2B side. So I worked in a lot of database marketing in a company called SunTrust, which is now Truist. I worked at E-Trade. So again, these ideas of being a B2C, getting out there, with your brand. And then I went on the vendor side, and I was lucky enough to work at a company called Digital Sciences that got acquired by a company called WebSideStory, that got acquired by a company called Omniture, that got acquired by Adobe.

Needless to say, it was a little bit of a crazy ride. I spent 10 years at Adobe, I ran the SE organization. So we talked to marketers all day about how do you drive that art and science balance, right? Where it’s both data-driven but creative.

I was lucky enough to run the Creative Cloud Enterprise, go to market. So that was pretty fun, where you start to think about, “How do we use the incredible tools that Adobe have at their to inspire people around the globe?” Then I took a little bit of a departure, went to a company called Box and spent a year in customer success, which was interesting but clarifying, which I realized that I really loved being in front of customers, but I liked talking to marketers and my people.

I was lucky enough after just over a year to step into the CMO role, and it was the first time, being a practitioner at scale. It’s much harder, I think I had, uh, sort of spouted off for years being at Adobe you just have to be data-driven and the art and science, and it all works together and it’s super easy.

And then, a few years ago, was lucky enough to join Twilio and, uh, been CMO here for just over two years and, and brought you aboard as well.

Adam Morgan

Mm-hmm. Thank you, by the way. Just looking at your background, you’ve talked often about generalists versus specialists. And you certainly have had a varied past of a generalist being able to fill in a lot of different roles, which has been pretty fascinating. But you’ve also said that a CMO has to think like a business leader first, and I think that’s been very apparent, here at Twilio. Tell us more about that. What does that mean to have a business leader mindset first rather than just your specialty?

Chris Kohler

I think it’s very easy for marketers quickly to get enamored with all their own metrics, right?

Where we’re in it every day. We’re talking about ICPs and MQLs and all of the craft of marketing. But when you get to the exec level and you’re sitting in a room with all of your

peers that run product and sales and finance they don’t know what you’re talking about, right?

They’re like, “What is all this, this jargon,” it’s like, “Oh, we need to go drive awareness for TOFU, MOFU, BOFU,” right? And they’re like, “I don’t have no idea what you’re thinking about.” And so I think as marketing leaders, as creative leaders, we have to connect the work to the business problem that ultimately we’re trying to solve.

And at the end of the day,most companies trying to drive it at a profitable way and create a great experience for the products that we deliver. And so I, I encourage, all the marketers think about how does the work that we do tie to the business objectives of the company.

And so in order to do that, you have to think not just in the marketing terms, but how does that relate? I’ve run marketing. I’ve been customer success. I’ve been in the sales organization. So sort of leading from that perspective of, “How can marketing help and partner with sales,” right, in a way that has some empathy of what they’re going through and vice versa? I often talk about this where let’s think about as a business leader that wears the marketing hat, and I think that makes you a much better,marketer, in the long run.

Adam Morgan

That’s been interesting. On this show, we’ve talked to a lot of creative leaders about that, that you can’t just show up with big ideas that have no substance. Like, they’ve gotta be on strategy and they’ve gotta actually, work for the company. We call it learning to speak khaki. I don’t know if that’s still totally appropriate ’cause it used to be people, you know, the business people were wearing suits, but now it’s more business casual, so learning to speak their language I think is super critical.

Chris Kohler

And again, being the translation layer, and we have to do that for our teams as well, right? part of our role is to educate our teams on the implications of the work that you’re doing. How does that tie back into the goals of the company? And if we don’t do that, then they feel disconnected because they don’t feel pride of what they’re working is actually driving, outcomes for the business.

Adam Morgan

Yeah, exactly. All right, so you and I, we work in B2B, and, uh, one of the principles you often talk to us about is to be bold and have some fun with it. And I wanna dig into that a little bit more. What does that actually mean in practice to you, especially inside a large B2B tech company?

Chris Kohler

Part of it comes from being on the B2C side and looking at so many of my peers that are running fun, interesting, bolder ideas.

And I often get the question of like, “Well, which B2B companies, which campaigns do you like?” And all that, and it’s so hard to actually, recall anything that is memorable on this front. I think sometimes as leaders, we’re still selling to people, but they’re people that work within businesses, and we’re afraid to bring this sometimes edgy, sometimes emotional, really creative concepts to them that are memorable because it’s like, well, we have to be serious, right?

We’re a business selling to a business. And it’s like, well, yeah, but the people are the people that are buying from this business. The risk tolerance of B2B companies is, is so low that people are afraid to, to some degree stick their neck out and try something different.

Back in the day, like I worked for a CMO called Nick Utton, who was at MasterCard before he came to E-Trade,and he did the Priceless campaign and, and all that.

And you’re just like, there’s a DNA that you’ve gotta break through the noise to be memorable, to be creative, to do something different. And I think the reality is too many B2B leaders are afraid to try something.we end up using the same tactics over and over and over again, and it all becomes noise

Adam Morgan

Yeah. It’s so interesting.oftentimes in B2B it’s very technical products, and the audience is very technical. I’ve seen a lot of research where technical people just don’t want any of the marketing fluff, which, whatever. I actually wrote an article about this called “Developers Have Feelings Too” that I should probably share with you.

It’s just this interesting thing where it’s like they’re these special breeds. But no, they’re humans just like the rest of us. They’ll geek out on the latest,fantasy novel or pop culture moment, just like the rest of us. But there was one past company, the CEO, we tried something bold with, uh, the website, and he came back and his response was, “This doesn’t look like all the other B2B websites, therefore it probably doesn’t work.

We need to make sure that it fits within that mold.” So I think there really is something to breaking that mold that I think is so prevalent in tech.

Chris Kohler

I think this is a human trait where conformity is really hard to break out of, right?

And there are a few people throughout history that have broken out and thought about doing things in different ways. And so that comment of, “Hey, it doesn’t look like every other B2B,” well, yeah, that’s intentional because we actually do wanna be different. Yeah. That would be good.

I’ve been part of multiple of those conversations where it’s like, “Well, what does Company X do? What do they do? What do they do? Let’s go see what they do, and then maybe we

replicate that.” And I think there’s, there’s some part of that may, may be worthwhile in doing a part of that.

But if you’re literally copying and just doing the same, how is there any clarity around how you’re different and how you differentiate the brand? You don’t. You just become noise like every other brand.

Adam Morgan

Yeah. Speaking of breaking out, there’s also probably a certain way that most CMOs should act, and you certainly don’t.

You’re willing to be weird, self-depreciating, and occasionally turn yourself into the content. So tell me about why is that worth doing in your mind? Why do you like doing that?

Chris Kohler

I mean, one, it’s, I mean, we’re having fun, right?

But I think at the end of the day, it shows that if I’m willing to do it, everyone else can do it as well, right? And I think, setting the example, why am I asking the team to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself? I think that really sends a message to the rest of the organization that it’s okay.

And, and we’ve done stuff that has been fun and engaging and maybe hasn’t hit, and we’ve done other stuff that really sort of took off in a way because it is so different.

I think too often we’re just afraid to do anything that’s memorable.

Adam Morgan

Do you think it’s because people feel like it’s unprofessional? ago at a company that will not be named, I got some feedback that I was told that I need to be more professional, more serious, and not mess around. What are your thoughts about marketers misunderstanding this being professional Should a brand be professional? Should we be professional?

Chris Kohler

There’s a line obviously to draw, but, if you’re having fun, it’s in line with sort of what your brand values are, what your company values I think it’s humanizing I think too often as leaders, uh, we wanna protect our brand in a way that makes us realize we don’t actually have a brand, right?

Those that are willing to have a voice, be out there, do something different, something memorable, those are the people that actually have a brand.

Too often I look at peers or other people across the marketing industry and I’ll be like, “Are they writing anything? Are they posting anything? Do they have a point of view?” And, you know, too often it’s, they, they don’t, right?

It’s like, well, let me just repost whatever the company content is. But do they have a point of view around where the industry’s headed and all of those things? And, and too often they don’t. And so they don’t have a brand. They are just spouting off whatever the corporate narrative is, in support of them.

Adam Morgan

I think that’s so fascinating the trend a while ago was like, “Don’t do your own personal brand. It looks like you’re trying to be bigger than the company brand.” But I think it’s really synergistic. it’s almost like a sign that you’re alive and your brand and your company is alive when you’re out there sharing thoughts and ideas and trying to influence the market.

Chris Kohler

There’s an interesting article on Inc. that talked about this new CMO who just joined Air. There’s a quote in there that really struck with me that I wrote it down.

It says, “Does being a CMO still mean being the person behind the brand, or does it increasingly mean being part of the story yourself?” one of the quotes he had is that, “I sat through years of strategy decks about authenticity while giving the least authentic version of myself in every public appearance.”

Right? And, and it’s like, it’s kinda true, right? Where you’re like, “I don’t wanna actually, share my views. I want the team to lead. I wanna put them out in front. It’s about the brand, it’s not about me.” But I think in this world, more and more, whether it’s buyers or consumers or whatever it is, they wanna understand the people behind, right? Who they’re engaged with and they’re building partnerships with as well.

Adam Morgan

So what’s interesting is, okay, two years ago when I first started, one of the first things, challenges that you gave me is you said that we need to get our swagger back as a company,

So I guess that’s the question is from the CMO perspective, how do you know when a brand needs more emotion or personality or needs to be more absurd versus when it’s just creative people just trying to do something crazy and make noise?

Chris Kohler

If it is authentic and it really speaks to your customers, then I think that that works.

I’ll give you an example. My observation when I first joined Twilio, and, and I’d always known Twilio as like the developer company that we’d done such an incredible job of building this brand, of being for developers. And I got here and I reviewed all the content that we were creating, right?

The campaigns that were going out the door and all that, and it just felt like everything else that I had seen from every other brand. And I was like, “There’s no differentiation. There’s

nothing here that I can tell is this unique to Twilio.” And I also realized like we are the undisputed leader in the space that we play in, but we don’t show it.

It’s almost like we’re apologetic of the success that we’ve had to some degree. My guidance to the team was, “Hey, let’s go have some fun. Let’s go tell the market that we are the leader around this. Let’s go have some fun with our developers again.” Let’s get back to that fun, quirky, developer.

We have an interesting internal culture, right, where we embrace the sort of inner geek. And I’m like, “Why aren’t we doing that externally?” And it just was clear that we weren’t, and so that was part of the direction is like let’s go get some swagger, let’s have some fun, let’s go speak to our audience again.

And I think the work that you and the team did really paid off because as I talk to our customers, they’re like, “It speaks to me.” Like, “I love what you’ve done. It feels like you’re back,”

Adam Morgan

Yeah, and I think even more so, like you having some of those big statements of like, “Be bold, try something crazy,” “Get out there,” “Push the limits, be daring.”

I think that’s had a huge impact. I know at least on my team, they’ll always go back to “Oh yeah, but Chris wants us to be bold, so we gotta, we gotta push a little harder. We gotta try a little bit more.” At least from that leadership’s perspective, that’s been pretty critical from the top down to have that mantra as we come up with stuff.

Chris Kohler

I think it’s, it’s easy to say, it’s harder to do. The way that I often think through this is naturally you’re gonna have mental constraints around why you can’t do something big, right? I think this is just human nature where you’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna come up with this big idea.”

“Oh man, that is super cool, but…” Right? There’s always the but. Do we have budget? Do we have time? Do we have the team to go do that? We’ve gotta go deliver all these other things. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. So you almost talk yourself out of it. And I think sometimes, “Well actually, don’t put those constraints on.” Put the crazy ideas. The worst we can say is like, “Hey, I love it, but we can’t do X, Y, and Z, but we could do Y.” Right? And maybe it’s like a smaller version of your big idea. if I’m not saying bring the big ideas, naturally the team’s all gonna come with small incremental stuff they know that they can go deliver.

Adam Morgan

So you and I have had to build this trust of, understanding that value and pushing and wanting more and understanding, it takes a team to get to those bigger, bolder ideas. But

maybe let’s think about, so what are the pressures that you as a CMO have to deal with in order to get bolder work approved from your end?

Or what do you need to do to be careful to not sand off all the edges? What are some of the things that you deal with as a CMO of going up to Co or others on the board to make sure that it’s not too crazy?

Chris Kohler

There’s a balance of sort of risk that I have to think through. I use this sort of filter saying, “Okay, if I take a step back, big idea, you know, what are the potential risks this might, we might run into?”

And it’s okay to talk out loud around some of those things. “Well, is this gonna resonate with the customer? What are the implications of this? What are the risks associated with the brand?” And in many cases, that’s sort of up to me to manage.

I don’t have my boss going in and approving, and, and vice versa. I’m not doing that for you guys either. you have to be able to scale at an organization our size. I can’t look at every aspect of everything we’re doing around the globe.

That’s just unrealistic, right? So, you have to have trust in your leaders, and basically empowering them to go do it. Now, if there’s something you guys bring to me that’s like, “Hey, this is, this is something we need your eyes on,” because it is,got a lot of visibility on it.

I always take that stance of, okay, is it helping the business? What are the objectives we know we need to go do? Do we have to break through in a new category some new products that we’re developing? Do we need to go increase our brand awareness in other countries? Does that help us think through that?

So I’m applying, here are the big problems I know at a company level we’re trying to solve. Does this fit into that? Or in many cases, and again, a lot of this comes down to budget sometimes too, where you’re like, “Okay, well, if I’ve got a dollar to spend, do I put it against this or something else?

And which of these programs and projects and ideas are gonna help me drive that, revenue, uh, for the business?” In many cases, it may be that we need to go drive top-of-funnel awareness stuff so that we ultimately down the road, it can make it easier for us to grow revenue on certain aspects.

When someone’s pitching, don’t immediately shut it down. Ask questions, refine, refine, and try to get their thought process around that.

It’s very easy, right, to have a reaction to something and shut it down and be like, “Nope, I hate that.” Right? Move to the next one. But then you kill the creativity of whoever it is. And

so in many cases you’re like, “Okay, tell me how you were thinking about it. Well, if you were in my shoes, how would I think about this aspect of it?” And have them walk through it, ’cause then it’s a teaching moment.

Because if the idea is bad, right, you at least wanna not say, “Hey, that’s a really bad idea, but here are the things you should think about around that.” So again, I wanna give the team confidence that they can, the next time they’re coming in to pitch, they’re not losing that, “Oh, I’m just gonna water it down and make it safe.”

Adam Morgan

Yep. ‘Cause they don’t wanna get their head bit off, yeah, just right off the bat. It’s interesting, it’s a similar philosophy that I have that you, and I appreciate it, that you don’t have to make every decision. Same thing with my team. There’s a lot of day-to-day stuff that they just need to take care of, and I kinda see my role as more the visionary, guiding the ship little turns at a time rather than coming in and trying to do all the block and tackling, individually.

But, sometimes I’ll tell them, if it’s a big enough thing, bring it in front of me, but I will have an opinion. If it’s a small thing, don’t bring it to me ’cause then I’ll have an opinion and you may not want that.”

Chris Kohler

There’s times where the team wants to highlight and show ideas that they’ve got and it’s like, well, sometimes be careful what you wish for because you will get feedback, right? I think one of the things as you get more senior in your organization, sometimes the team will take your feedback as direction, and in many cases it’s just an opinion, right? And, I often have to preface what I’m saying as like, “This is just my opinion. This isn’t a tell. I’m just telling you my point of view around it. But if you wanna go do this, great.” There’s something we’ve had to learn as you get more senior is the weight of your comments matter a lot, and the team always reads into that more than you think,

Adam Morgan

Well, there’s something you did recently that I thought was really great, you had heard that some of the folks on my team had some ideas, and so you set up like an individual one-on-one or a two-on-one to just have them pitch some crazy ideas, and then if there’s something that you really like, then you’ll fund it, right?

And I thought that was a really fun opportunity for them to get just some visibility and also just know like, yeah, he really does care about this. it’s not words. So tell me about that whole experience—

Chris Kohler

Like one, I have fun in those sessions because I love to riff off of their ideas too.

And so that’s where I’m always preface this, where it’s like, “Listen, you’re gonna pitch me on some of this, but I’m gonna build on it.” In many cases I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool, but what if we also extend it to this and this and this?” And then, and then you get the creative juices flowing where they feel like they’re, together building whatever, the idea, the creative.

In many cases I’ll sit back and be like, “Oh man, they’ve thought through this whole thing. This is awesome.” And there’s, there were examples, like I did this on Monday with a couple of people on your team where I was like—Mm-hmm … “I love this idea. Like, I need you to get in front of the leadership team on Thursday and you’re gonna pitch this.”

We’re basically gonna walk through the ideas around a big campaign that I was like, “I love this, but could we go bigger? What about X?” “And how can we extend it beyond?” For one, I get energy out of it because I feel like, too often I’m just reviewing and giving yes or no around things.

I’m not creating as much anymore. And I love the creative process of coming up with some of these ideas. I get energy around it and I think they get energy because we’re, they get access to me and, and we can work through those things. So I’d encourage a lot more people to do it. In a smaller setting it feels safer because what ends up happening is when you get into a group of six, seven people, you have a couple people that end up dominating. Others then retreat back and, and they don’t have their opinion.

Adam Morgan

Has there been a moment where the team has pushed you on or brought an idea and it’s somewhere you probably wouldn’t have gone on your own?

But where’s an example of where that was just too far, and then maybe were they right and where they pushed and it was a good way to go that, you know, you weren’t ready, or is it an idea that was, like, just way too wacky and out there?

Chris Kohler

I think there are definitely examples, yes, and it happens, like, quite often.

What often happens now is social ideas. And so social right now is sort of the easiest quick hit you can get out there, I can post that and, and get it done very quickly. There’ve been multiple in even the last few months where maybe it’s a TikTok trend, right?

That is like, “Hey, we’d love you to go do this.” And I look at it and I go, “Nope. Um, sorry.” “I’m not doing that.” I’m just like, “I get it. It’s a trend. Everyone’s posting. it’s just not me,” you know? And so I’m gonna push back on that one. there’s been others, especially around a lot of the videos, where they’re like, “Here’s the script.”

And I’m like, “Oh, man. Like, really? You want me to do this?” And I’m like, “Okay, um, I’ll be game. Uh, I don’t love it, but I’ll do it.” And that typically works, right? When, when I get

uncomfortable or I’m like, “Wow. This is pushing it a little bit. that’s often the content that works the most, right? And so I think that’s one of my lessons.

Adam Morgan

More attention for sure.

Chris Kohler

Yeah. The lesson is to be open to the thing that makes you a little bit more comfortable. Uh, one, it allows you to grow, but two, it’s probably the things that are gonna work the most, and of course sometimes they don’t work and you sort of move on and you learn from it.

Adam Morgan

Yeah. I guess that’s the experimentation culture.

All right. I wanna move on to this last section. So this year has clearly been the year of AI, and in this season we’ve had many, many episodes on AI and how as creative leaders, we can use it to our best advantage. But I just wanna get your perspective on it a little bit as well.

So certainly it’s changing the volume and speed of content and marketing overnight, Although now it feels like it’s settling in now a little bit more versus a year or so ago when it was like the freak out moment. Now it’s more of like, okay, we’re here.

This is happening. What does it mean for you as far as like your expectation on what creative teams and leaders need to do with AI in order to operate efficiently today?

Chris Kohler

The immediate thing we all go to is like efficiency, right? And, you know, I’ve thought a lot about this

There’s always some constraint on resources to get content out the door, right? And this happens not just in the creative teams, but across all parts of the organization. And the thing that AI is allowing us to do is to create that content faster. but it needs to be better, right? And I think that’s the thing that just because we can create content and get it out the door faster doesn’t mean that’s a good thing.

And I worry a lot around AI slop, and the reality is like there is a ton of it. And, I think we’ve gotta get back to this world where we’re using our AI from, it’s gonna make the work better, not just faster and more efficient. And I don’t know that enough people are talking about that.

And listen, I’m guilty of it. How many times have I told you, Adam, like, you know, “Why can’t we do this faster?” And, “Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea.” Like, “Hey, could you create a video using only AI in the next week to go do X, Y, and Z?”

And you’re like, “Yeah, um, maybe, maybe not.” So I think setting the expectations around it as well. But I think at the end of the day, the work has to be better, not just faster and more efficient.that’s a lot of what I worry about is people aren’t thinking through that.

Adam Morgan

Yeah. That’s what we talk all the time, taste and judgment and originality need to be there to have that advantage. use the tools to give you the space to add in the taste and judgment so that you can make sure it’s better.

Chris Kohler

It’s really hard in this day and age not to want to produce more, more content.

Like, you know, get out there, more content, and we’re all dealing with GO and AEO and like more content, more content, more content. But I do think there’s a world where at some point, because we’re gonna be saturated with so much content, that the brands that say less, actually might be the way that you differentiate.

It’s like almost like highly curated, less but better versus I just put so much out there in the world. And I think that’s a really, really scary thing to think about because, we judge ourselves by how much we produce, and the reality is it might be we need to judge ourselves of how great the work that we’re doing and the results that are around them.

Adam Morgan

Yeah, there was some research that I had when I was writing my book years ago, and even before AI, it was still all about efficiency and speed and people’s attention spans are getting smaller and smaller. But the reality of the research was that it has nothing to do with the speed.

It’s all about the value. Is there an anomaly or a thing that you’re giving them in your content that they notice because it’s something that they care about and that they need or they want? That value is the most important thing. So whether it’s a 30-minute video or a 10-second social clip, if it has the right value for them, that’s where they’re gonna tune in and give you attention for sure.

Chris Kohler

Yeah, 100%. Like it has to speak to the audience and it has to feel emotive. And I think too often we mistake that for just the amount of content that is created. And it’s like, well, if we just, if we tell our audience more and more and more and more, then they’ll be more educated. The reality is it’s all noise.

And that’s the thing is, you know, how do you create something that makes a connection with someone that is memorable?

Adam Morgan

Now I’m sure we could get pushback. It’s like, oh great, with AEO and SEO you have to have

volume. And it’s like, yeah, we get that. But those are just lots of different topics and lots of value in different moments that are still important.

Chris Kohler

Yeah. how do you, how do you create all the content for machines but write for humans? I think too often what we forget is we’re writing for agentic, but those agents are doing something on behalf of humans.

And so whatever resonates with that human should resonate with the agent as well. we’re very early in this. It keeps changing, And I think we’re gonna stumble through this. this is like the early days of how we dealt with digital, right?

You remember the early days of Adobe as we were building products and trying to adjust and this is a multi-year journey that we’re gonna, we’re gonna work our way through.

Adam Morgan

Yep. All right. Well, and the next couple questions I want to ask you are around advice for the audience listening to this podcast.

So you’ve talked a lot about being a generalist. So as the creative leaders who are listening to this, listening to this show, what would you tell them that, what do they need to be good at beyond their traditional craft and if they want to become more valuable today in the AI era?

Chris Kohler

I think there’s like, there’s probably multiple iterations of what generalist

So if I think about the creative space For a long time, we’ve created specialization within the creative teams, right? I’m a video person.I do content, uh, or I’m a writer. I’m an editor around that piece. I think the reality is with these AI tools, they’re gonna allow you to spread your wings even within, like say, the creative department, right?

Where now individuals are gonna be able to do more along that workflow, where maybe they can create multiple iterations of assets across different mediums as we think through that. So that’s one aspect of, okay, can I do more even within the creative function as we think through that? Multidisciplinary.

Multidisciplinary, which I think is now that the tools should be able to help, more and more people do that. But then as you sort of expand that out and you say, “Okay, well, what about broader things?” One of the things I’ve often challenged our team is campaigns take a long time traditionally to get out the door.

But the reality is, how can you speed that up as long as they’re good, right? In a way that you take more of that workflow. The thing that I’ve often talked about is if we think about

any workflow in, let’s say in marketing as a whole, right? There’s, “Oh, we gotta build a creative brief, and we gotta do this.”

It is almost like a production line, right? We talked about this for years of like a production line of content. Well, what if it doesn’t have to be that way. What if me as a creative, I can go and actually do more of that myself? Maybe I can think about what’s the media plan and use AI to help me around that.

Maybe I could get access to the dashboard and do the analytics around that piece of it. I now can basically own a broader set of the capabilities across that workflow. And so that’s the thing I would challenge us, get outside your swim lanes of, your specialization, even within the department, then within marketing, and then broader, just think more generally, “Okay, the work that I’m doing, how does this apply to the business problem I’m trying to solve?”

And think about that as, okay, is this helping us drive revenue? Is it helping us retain customers? Is it helping us drive our brand? Like all of those things. I don’t think we’re gonna get in a world where I’m like, “Oh, everyone in finance is now gonna, you know, be a creative department.”

But I think having more understanding of why finance might be pushing back on spending dollars around things that tie back into the work you’re doing, that’s not a bad thing,

Adam Morgan

I think it’s a natural progression just as you grow as a leader and more senior in organizations to look across disciplines and understand their language and try and speak to them in a way that, yeah, from finance to HR to, you know, the C-suite, make sure that everything, all the work you’re doing is, is leveling up to the right things.

Chris Kohler

One of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about sort of what’s the future marketing organization look like. If you think about the way they’re organized today, we’re organized by discipline, right? We’ve got our creative and brand team, we’ve got our campaigns team, we’ve got our product marketing team, we’ve got our growth team.

Everyone will have time slices of some business problem you’re trying to solve. I do think there’s a world in the foreseeable future where we’re more goal-oriented as teams, and I don’t know exactly how that works. It might be, we’re exploring this pod concept and others—

Adam Morgan

Mm-hmm.

Chris Kohler

Where we’re gonna go solve a business problem and we’re gonna put a cross-functional

multidisciplinary team, small, that’s gonna go solve that problem. And rather than having the 10 departments that we’ve gotta go engage, we got four, four people on this team and they can do all of it, right?

And so that’s just some things that I’ve been thinking about is, how do you organize around the business problem versus organized around the department that we’re all part of.

Adam Morgan

All right, two more questions. For any marketing executives listening, how do they create more psychological and organizational permission for creative teams to surprise them?

And then from a creative leader who wants their CMO to take a bigger swings, what would a creative leader do differently in the next pitch? Or how do they approach a CMO differently in order to start these conversations so that they can have a better chance big bold moves?

Chris Kohler

I think there’s like two lenses that you, you asked there. So if we take, I’m a creative lead, like creative leader pitching the CMO. If the CMO does not have that sort of affinity to go bigger, I think you have to, to some degree use data to show why this matters,

And so if you can story tell around, “Here’s the problem that we’re dealing with today. We’re doing the same old stuff.

It works, it’s fine. But what if we did X, Y, and Z? Here’s the business problem that I think we could solve much faster if we go at it.” you almost have to break down what we’re doing today versus what we think the new big, bold ideas might be able to achieve in the future, and put that into sort of the business value around that piece.

So I think that’s one. I think if I’m a business leader and I want my teams to come, one, I have to continue to say that. It’s really easy to be like, “Oh, we should be bold.” and they’re like, “Oh, great. What does that mean?”

You know, where we created as one of our four strategic pillars, you know, where for the last three years that has been one of our pillars is like be bold. And so we’ve built that into the psyche and the culture, and we said, often let’s test and learn. So if you want your teams to go do that, you need to demonstrate to the whole org that it’s okay to fail, first of all, because not every idea is gonna work.

But then continue to reinforce and highlight when they are doing cool stuff, right? Here’s a great example of where the team was being bold, and you highlight that, and then other people on the team are like, “Wait, I wanna, I wanna be recognized like that.

Let me come up with something as well.” It’s really easy as a leader to say, “You guys should be more bold and we should, let’s go get an agency to do all of this stuff,” and like,

“We need to be doing that.” The reality is like you have to set the culture that it is okay. You have to lead yourself.

Why I, I do some of these crazy ideas, why I sit down with the team, because I think that leading from the top of, if I’m willing to do it, I’m willing to press and, and put myself out there And let’s all do it, together.

Adam Morgan

That’s awesome. Awesome advice. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Chris. Even though I’m lucky enough to have it, you know, at our biweekly, but—

Chris Kohler

I don’t know if lucky enough is the right, uh, response, but yes. Yeah.

Adam Morgan

I think so. I think so. I’m pretty psyched about it. Anyhow, this has been a great conversation. I just wanna summarize some of the things we’ve talked about for the audience.

First of all, B2B buyers are still human. Complexity and enterprise stakes are just reasons to make the story more clear and more memorable, not reasons to strip out personality. Like they are humans. They want to hear it all. Next, bold creative requires leadership permission and business fluency, so you need to learn to speak khaki.

The best CMO creative partnerships challenge each other while still staying aligned the business outcomes. And finally, AI raises the value of human judgment. As execution gets faster, creative leaders need to have broader business understanding, stronger taste, and the ability to keep rebuilding the plan.

Those are just some of the things we talked about today. So thank you, Chris, for all that great advice and great conversation, and appreciate you coming on the show.

Chris Kohler

Thank you, Adam, and thanks for all the incredible work you and the team do.

Adam Morgan

I’ll let them know. Thank you.