CMO Chats with Ryan Nelsen, CMO at StackAdapt

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world and are thrilled to have Ryan with us today.

Hey everyone, welcome to CMO chats. My name is Ryan. I’m the CMO at StackAdapt.

Why don’t you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your role at StackAdapt?

I’ve been with the company for almost a year this week. We’re an incredibly fast-growing ad tech company, and I’ve been leading global marketing for the last year. It’s an incredible, talented team. We have a fully remote workforce, founded in Toronto 10 years ago. We started in Toronto but have scaled to have employees all over the world. I have a team at StackAdapt across all the different disciplines of Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Comms, PR, Brand, Field Marketing, Events, and our international regional team. It’s been a great year and a very special place to be.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into marketing?

I started out of college. A neighbour who was a good mentor to me growing up had a company and needed someone to help him out. I started working there, and they needed someone to do marketing. So, I started wearing a lot of hats, writing a lot of content, and running our email programs back then. It was really helpful for me. I started to love the creative side of things and the data side of things. I worked there for several years, learned a lot, and learned about business. I went on to another tech company where I learned as well. Then I got a call one day from a friend who was running sales at Qualtrics. He said, “We want you to use our software,” and we went to lunch as more of a sales call. I listened to him just to catch up, mostly. At the end of the meeting, he said, “You’d actually be great working here. You should come and meet our team. Come meet our CEO.” That was when we had fewer than 100 employees, or so around that time. I met Ryan Smith, the founder of Qualtrics, and joined as the first product marketer there. I was involved in a lot of our category creation of experience management, and a lot of our launch of our CX business, our customer experience business, that went to $100 million in revenue very quickly, probably the fastest company at the time. That was a journey I’m incredibly grateful for. I went from Product Marketing, launching products and solutions, to building out our global field marketing strategy and our enterprise marketing strategy. That was an incredible time. We were then acquired by SAP, which was all about the messaging around experience data and operational data. We were the world leader, I believe, in experiential data. SAP claimed and mentioned operational data connecting the X and O. We had an elevator in the building with X and O for Valentine’s Day that we put up, and the X and O came together. It was a powerful learning about category and what that can do for a brand.

Long story short, I was recruited to lead marketing at MX. It’s a local tech company growing very rapidly in Utah. I ran marketing there and scaled it for five years. Then, a year ago, a group agency reached out to me and said, “There’s a really special company called StackAdapt. They are growing incredibly fast, hired about 400 people last year, 1400 employees globally, one of the most special companies that they’ve ever seen.” It seemed too good to be true, but I definitely had more to do at MX. I said, “You know what? I’ll meet with the founder and let’s see what they’re all about.” I immediately knew that there was a special founding team, a special company, and I joined in May last year. I’ve been building and growing since.

What would you say is your main marketing focus for StackAdapt at the moment?

We’re a programmatic platform, so we are a product, probably more so than most B2B companies. My eyes have been opened to driving a lot more impact across channels beyond LinkedIn and Google, and some of the traditional B2B platforms that we all use. With StackAdapt, we can now run display, native digital audio, video ads, connected TV ads, and digital out-of-home ads. You can start to track your buyers and engage with them where they may land at an airport. They see a billboard. Maybe you’re showing up to an event that you’re hosting in the area. They see something. They get in their Lyft. They see an ad for Lyft or Uber around your brand and your event. They show up at the hotel; the TV in their hotel is connected to their device as well. We can start to be a lot more personalised, engaging with the message, and make sure that your brand appears everywhere. More specifically, the concept of brand marketing and performance marketing, which we all talk about—there’s brand, the art and the science, the heart and the mind of marketing. We can now take traditional brand marketing plays of connected TV and drive performance based on those with QR codes and other things to drive an action, which is an exciting time to be a marketer.

How would you define success in marketing?

It’s doing what we say we’re going to do, setting big, audacious goals, and then finding a path to make it happen. The best business leaders and marketers set very aggressive targets and find a way. That’s why I like to surround myself with people who push the limits and do creative things, but also have the ROI to back it up, which is the sweet spot.

What would you say is the biggest challenge marketers face today?

It’s the interconnection of data and technology, and the rapid change happening in tech stacks. StackAdapt is named for consolidating your ad stack and streamlining it, making that easier. I use an AI coach on Fridays now, basically sharpening the saw on AI with our team and making sure there’s a crowdsourced method for our team to come together. I ask them one question: “What have you done with AI this week to make your job more impactful?” We then crowdsource those ideas, get better at using technology and tools to accelerate the impact we’re making. It’s super hard right now as a marketer to stay on top of all of that. So that’s one small way or idea to stay on top of it.

Could you give us a bit of an idea of who your ICP is at StackAdapt?

We serve every industry, but primarily agencies and brands. So, a Director of Media or Ad Buying at an agency, or a Digital Leader at a B2B company running digital campaigns and programmatic. Often, it’s a CMO, in many cases, depending on the company size. It’s a marketer marketing to marketers, which is fun. I like to be in that spot where I understand them, I understand what they’re going through, and I can connect with them on a deeper level.

I’d like to ask you a couple of questions based on marketing’s relationship with sales. Which marketing strategies would you say have yielded the most success in terms of engagement or lead generation at StackAdapt?

Internally, I try to make our Chief Revenue Officer the most successful person in the company. If they are very successful and their teams are successful in hitting aggressive numbers, revenue solves a lot of problems. Internally, just making sure that the ecosystem and connection are a very strong foundation of trust. It’s all one funnel, one team. We have really great attribution on things, but at the end of the day, attribution doesn’t really matter when you’re winning because they know that we’re doing our job and giving our very best to make an impact. We know they’re doing the same, and that’s the culture we try to create.

We’ve all been there where a salesperson points a finger at a marketer, or a marketer points at a salesperson, saying, “It’s your fault.” That’s not a situation anyone wants to be in. If you’re currently in that situation, I have empathy for that.

As it relates to your question about what’s working, I’ve never been a believer in making the marketing team measure on leads or MQLs and throwing it over the fence. I measure our team on SQLs and opportunities, and even a revenue number connected to it. The marketing team often doesn’t get commission on the revenue number, but I still feel like we have skin in the game to own. What’s the SQL to opportunity conversion path? What’s the opportunity to Stage 3, 4, 5, and close? We need to make sure we have skin in the game and are very, very connected to that because our product marketing team, demand gen teams, and comms teams all play a role in what message we’re sharing, what their competitive proof points or value propositions are, all those different areas. So it’s important to build the team through the whole funnel.

In terms of marketing events, what would you say is the most successful event or engagement piece you’ve hosted? And why?

We just got back from Nashville, hosting an event called “Conversion” for StackAdapt. We had an invite-only experience for about 300 clients and partners, where we had incredible speakers. We rented out Justin Timberlake’s private club and Blake Shelton’s club. We had Steve Augeri from Journey singing and Chris Janson bringing a Nashville vibe. It was an incredible week of discussions and learning. We’re going to scale that up and make it big over time.

The most impactful and broadest-reaching one I was a part of was a founding team that started an event for Qualtrics, called “X4.” We doubled it in size from about 500 to 1000, then 1000 to 2000, to 5000 to 10,000 to 15,000 in the last year. Last year, we had Oprah speaking, President Obama and Richard Branson on the main stage. Imagine Dragons was the band that year. We had Tony Hawk doing a half-pipe vert ramp inside a warehouse with a bunch of food trucks around it, so he brought all his buddies, Bob Burnquist and others. That was a rock show for a business event. It was incredibly impactful to see that ecosystem. We had a VIP track I ran with about 500 people, and then there was a track no one knew about, with about 50 people, which included executives from some of the very best brands in the world. That was powerful. It showed the power of bringing together people and ecosystems, and I saw the impact that had on the company.

That sounds very impactful. Was that last one internally organised by StackAdapt?

That last one, we did one in Nashville for StackAdapt. The one that I talked about with President Obama and Oprah was at Qualtrics, and that was 2019, just to your question about the broadest one I’ve done.

In terms of hosting events, what would you say are the most significant challenges?

It’s getting the details right. I’m very keen on surprise-and-delight moments, going above and beyond. I tend to send a survey ahead of time for events and ask, “What can we do to make your experience absolutely incredible while you’re here?” Then we go and deliver on that. In the past, at Qualtrics, someone came up with an idea called the “Dream Team.” They would ask anyone what they needed and would hand them a phone charger, hand sanitiser, or whatever it was. They would basically, like Oprah, give them things they needed throughout the week. That was a powerful moment where you could build a connection with a company and have someone think about you in a sea of people. That’s what events are about: relationships. The real reason you build an event is to bring people together, to connect on a human level, and to help them achieve their outcomes and goals, and your goals.

What career advice would you give to anyone who’s aspiring to start in the marketing industry?  

Right now, get really sharp on AI prompts. That’s changing so fast. I personally would hire and value people who are natural learners and curious about technology. The world of marketers is moving from execution to being an orchestrator or a conductor of an orchestra. Imagine being an individual contributor and, overnight, being able to have thousands of AI agents working on your behalf. The very best marketers are going to use that to amplify their impact. The worst marketers are going to use that to get lazy and let AI do the work for them. There are no real shortcuts in life, in my view. So, the very best are going to use AI for good and amplify their impact, becoming faster, bigger, and better as a company. Those who are just okay are going to use it to keep doing what they’re doing, but have AI replace their work. It’s up to you to choose what path you’re on, but it’s definitely changing the way we work.

A piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe does not apply to modern CMOS?

There’s this notion that the CMO is the easiest to get pushed out, with the shortest tenure at two years or less. I’ve found that if I am upfront and transparent with my CEO and truly work as a team, valuing and trusting each other, tenure can be a lot longer. I had the chance to be at Qualtrics for six years, progressing and then leading all of marketing at MX for over five years. Naturally, I saw how things could go. Things could have gone sideways a few different times when things were tough to do. But being upfront, and going back to what I said, if you do what you say you’re going to do, then things work out. They understand when you are amplifying and making things much, much better than they were previously. They know how good they have it. I tend to surround myself with incredible people and hire great leaders who are very good at what they do. I feel that’s where I focus a lot of my time: hiring really, really well. That changes everything.

My last question for you, Ryan, is, how would you describe the role of the CMO in one word, and why? 

I’d say bold. The best CMOs are bold in their ambition, bold in their action, bold in their campaigns, and bold in their messaging. The charter I was given when joining this company is that we fly under the radar too much. It’s a very fast-growing company, the fastest-growing demand-side platform, and one of the fastest-growing companies in North America, yet nobody really knew about us. We’re changing that narrative. It takes time, though. I always say my mom doesn’t know who Salesforce is, and that’s okay. They’re an enormous company, and they don’t serve everybody as a B2B company. In many ways, they only need to have the buyers who are going to purchase with them know them. So, if you’re a B2B company, make sure you get really targeted and spend your dollars in the right places. Sometimes we get hung up on being a B2C brand and a brand that everybody knows, and that’s not what we signed up for as B2B marketers, even though it’s smart to think like a B2C CMO in the way that we do campaigns.